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The Brothers Karamazov
p805 [The prosecutor's speech at the trial] “What, after all, is this Karamazov family, which has gained such an unenviable notoriety throughout Russia?” he continued. “Perhaps I am exaggerating, but it seems to me that certain fundamental features of the educated class of today are reflected in this family picture -- only, of course, in miniature, ‘like the sun in a drop of water.’ [Did he throw this in for Goethe?] Think of that unhappy, vicious, unbridled old man, who has met with such a tragic end, the head of a family! Beginning life of noble birth, but in a poor dependent position... A low person, a toady and buffoon, of fairly good though undeveloped intelligence, he was above all a moneylender who grew bolder with growing prosperity. His abject and servile characteristics disappeared, his malicious and sarcastic cynicism was all that remained. On the spiritual side he was undeveloped, while his vitality was excessive. He saw nothing in life but sensual pleasure. He had no feelings for his duties as a father. He ridiculed those duties... He was an example of everything that is opposed to civic duty, of the most complete and malignant individualism: ‘The world may burn for all I care, so long as I am all right.’ And he was all right; he was content, he was eager to go on living in the same way for another twenty or thirty years...”
p806 “...he was a father, and one of the typical fathers of today... Many of them only differ in not openly professing such cynicism, for they are better educated, more cultured, but their philosophy is essentially the same as his...”
I hadn’t realized until now to what extent Fyodor represented bourgeois values to Dostoyevsky. He really is the epitome of the new, middle class man -- without culture or values.
“Now for the children of this father...”
p807 “The elder [of the younger two, Ivan] is one of those modern young men of education and intellect who has lost faith in everything. He has denied and rejected much already, like his father... [He then quotes Smerdyakov as saying,] ‘Everything in the world is lawful according to him, and nothing must be forbidden in the future -- that is what he always taught me.’ [And] ‘If there is one of the sons that is like Fyodor Karamazov in character, it is Ivan.’ ”
...
“Then there is the third son. Oh, he is a devout and modest youth, who does not share his older brother’s gloomy and destructive theory of life. He has sought to cling to the ‘ideas of the people,’ or to what goes by that name in some circles of our intellectual classes. He clings to the monastery, and was within an ace of becoming a monk. He seems to me to have betrayed unconsciously that timid despair which leads so many in our unhappy society, who dread cynicism and its corrupting influences and mistakenly attribute all the trouble to European enlightenment, to return to their ‘native soil,’ to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth. Like frightened children, they yearn to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their decrepit mother; to sleep there forever in order to escape the horrors that terrify them.
p808 “For my part I wish the young man every success. I trust that his youthful idealism and impulse toward the ideas of the people may never degenerate, as often happens, on the moral side into gloomy mysticism, and on the political into blind Chauvinism. These two elements are even a greater menace to Russia than the premature decay, due to misunderstanding and gratuitous adoption of European ideas, from which his elder brother is suffering.”
...
How often does an author get to openly explain the concept behind his characters? I still think it’s Pavel, not Ivan, who is most like the father, but otherwise this analysis is quite accurate. The degree to which “this” time in Russia differs from earlier periods is something I can’t comment on, but I do have doubts about. The myth of the “good old days” is so prevalent throughout history.
Ivan characterizes the bourgeois tendency toward nihilism while Alyosha shares the spirit that will lead to International Communism (and Fascism and even Islamic fundamentalism) -- the need to believe in something to make the world seem less meaningless.
This may be random (even for me) but I’m going to quote a passage from God’s Hotel by Victoria Sweet that I happened to just read,
p57 The transference is the name that the psychiatric profession, Sigmund Freud in particular, gave to the emotion that the patient transfers to the doctor during treatment. It is the love that he or she felt for his or her parents -- not the rational love, but the irrational love for the all-powerful father/mother in a three-year-old’s life. This transference was the key to psychic healing, the key to psychic change, Freud wrote, because it made the doctor what the doctor was not -- all-powerful. After the transference, the words, the nod, the blink of the doctor’s eyes would be all-important to the patient, would mean acceptance or rejection, pride or guilt, self-love or self-hate. And Mrs. McCoy, I saw by that flicker in her eyes, had fallen in love -- which is what the transference really is -- with me, her doctor. Not, of course, with me, the person, but with Me, the doctor-the being sitting in the chair by her bed.
It’s a lot of power, the transference. Mrs. McCoy’s transference to me meant she would wait, during the day, for my footsteps; she would stay alive for that reason. Her transference to me meant she would hang on my every word and try to please me. If I asked her, she would bestir herself; she would make an effort. She would sit up in bed and feed herself; she would exert herself and get stronger. She would go without complaint to rehabilitation; she would take her first steps, to please me. She would be pleasant to the nurses... She would participate in the life of the ward. Her transference to me meant she would live and not die.
Isn’t this the same thing that Zossima and the monks were seeking with God? That the lost Germans of the Teens and Twenties were looking for in Hitler? That numberless people have found in their gurus or faith healers or cult leaders?
[About Dmitri] “...While his brothers seem to stand for ‘Europeanism’ and ‘the principles of the people,’ he seems to represent Russia as she is. Oh, not all Russia, not all! God preserve us, if it were! Yet, here we have her, our mother Russia, the very scent and sound of her. Oh, he is spontaneous, he is a marvelous mingling of good and evil, he is a lover of culture and Schiller, yet he brawls in taverns and plucks out the beards of his boon companions. Oh, he, too, can be good and noble, but only when all goes well with him. What is more, he can be carried off his feet, positively carried off his feet by noble ideals, but only if they come of themselves, if they fall from heaven for him, if they need not be paid for. He dislikes paying for anything, but is very fond of receiving, and that’s so with him in everything. Oh, give him every possible good in life (he couldn’t be content with less), and put no obstacle in his way, and he will show that he, too, can be noble. He is not greedy, no, but he must have money, a great deal of money, and you will see how generously, with what scorn, he will fling it all away in the reckless dissipation of one night. But if he has no money, he will show what he is ready to do to get it when he is in great need of it...”
Dmitri has the attitude toward money of the dissipated gentry, not of the bourgeoisie. Grushenka, on the other hand, shares Fyodor’s bourgeois values when it comes to money. Who does he remind me of? Tolstoy’s Oblonsky in Anna Karenina to a small degree. I know there are literary English gentry perpetually in need of funds due to their spendthrift ways, but particular instances don’t come to mind just now.
[Again Rakitin is quoted about the Karamazovs,] p810 “...‘The sense of their own degradation is as essential to these reckless, unbridled natures as the sense of their generosity.’ And that’s true, they need continually this unnatural mixture. Two extremes at the same moment, or they are miserable and dissatisfied and their existence is incomplete. They are wide, wide as mother Russia; they include everything and put up with everything...”
Book XII. 12.
p855 [Fetyukovitch, the defense attorney, about Smerdyakov] “... He cursed and jeered Russia. He dreamed of going to France and becoming a Frenchman... I believe that he loved no one but himself and had a strangely high opinion of himself. His conception of culture was limited to good clothes, clean shirts and polished boots. Believing himself to be the illegitimate son of Fyodor Karamazov... he might well have resented his position, compared with that of his master’s legitimate sons. They had everything, he nothing. They had the rights, they had the inheritance, while he was only the cook and valet...
Again, Pavel represents the “New Man,” the bourgeois spirit as opposed to the traditional gentry, peasantry, and clergy. He is striving and not happy in his “place.” He thinks he deserves better but is without “culture.” And this emphasis on his illegitimacy reminds me of John the Bastard in Much Ado About Nothing. The concept of “legitimacy” is interesting here.
I’m not really writing about the trial itself, but I have to say that Fetyukovich did an excellent job of casting doubt on the guilt of his client. From my experience as a juror on a U.S. criminal case, I’ll say that if I were on this jury I could not find Dmitri guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt, of murder and especially not of robbery.
Another thought about Pavel and his parents. What does Dostoyevsky mean by having this crucial character be the child of the nihilistic Fyodor and the saintly (in a very unusual sense) Lizaveta? She is simple and holy in a way even Zossima and Father Ferapont couldn’t touch. He lives the “everything is lawful” philosophy Ivan merely talks about.
Architecture old and new
I’m sitting in an unusual location in the Bank Cafe -- one of the three really comfortable chairs, but this one is up on the mezzanine overlooking the main floor and the stairs down to the lower level, but also looking up a bit into the sky-lit lantern. This is a “new” architectural space; I can see the structure of the building including some massively reinforced moment frames; someone went nuts with a lighting catalog and included all sorts of trendy fixtures; there’s an area carpeted with Interface FLOR carpet tiles. From here I can see three variations on the Navy Chair. In the lower level there is a bleacher section next to the stairs where you can sit on beanbags or on the wood flooring. This isn’t fussy but is a tactile space that is comfortable and accessible.
The building that houses my gym is in the same position as this building but in the diagonal block. It is a beautiful example of high end architecture from the early 20th century with the most beautiful lobby I’ve ever seen. But as much as I love taking people there to awe them with the space, it is a standoffish sort of beauty. As is only appropriate for a busy lobby, it is a place where you might glance at the beauty around you but where you are not encouraged to linger.
I wish we had a good example of Richard Rodger’s architecture in the area just so I could get a feeling for how “comfortable” it is. Is the purity of the engineering just lovely to look at or does it make you want to hang out and really enjoy the space?
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