Abstract
This article analyzes the vision of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov as a narrative riff on Kant’s three basic questions. The novel shows what it means to live out “What can I know?” “What ought we do?” and “What may we hope?” It argues that this approach, combined with a rejection of the modernist dichotomy of “faith vs. reason,” overcomes the problems many critics see in the text. Ivan lives out a “first critique materialism”; Zosima and Alyosha show how to live out a “revised second critique solidarity”; the evolution of Grushenka and Dmitri—both “different people” in the final third of the novel than they were earlier—demonstrates “what we may hope.” Dostoevsky does, despite some critics’ claims, offer realistic responses to Ivan’s profound challenges to faith in the often-excerpted chapters, “Rebellion” and “The Grand Inquisitor.” The essay suggests that the lessons the novel teaches are applicable in our own world, where grace is also fragile. Grace can be rejected, as it is by Ivan, yet also be found in and through flawed vessels like Zosima, Alyosha, Grushenka, and Dmitri.
Keywords
Introduction
I begin with a Russian folk tale 1 about an onion, told by Grushenka, the woman desired by both a father, Fyodor Karamazov, and his son Dmitri, in The Brothers Karamazov: 2
Once upon a time there was a woman, and she was wicked as wicked could be, and she died. And not one good deed was left behind her. The devils took her and threw her into the lake of fire. And her guardian angel stood thinking: what good deed of hers can I remember to tell God? Then he remembered and said to God: once she pulled up an onion and gave it to a beggar woman. And God answered: now take that same onion, hold it out to her in the lake, let her take hold of it, and pull, and if you pull her out of the lake, she can go to paradise, but if the onion breaks, she can stay where she is. The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her: here, woman, he said, take hold of it and I’ll pull. And he began pulling carefully, and had almost pulled her all the way out, when other sinners in the lake saw her being pulled out and all began holding on to her so as to be pulled out with her. But the woman was wicked as wicked could be, and she began to kick them with her feet: ‘It’s me who’s getting pulled out, not you; it’s my onion, not yours.’ No sooner did she say it than the onion broke. And the woman fell back into the lake and is burning there to this day. And the angel wept and went away. That’s the fable, Alyosha, I know it by heart, because I myself am that wicked woman. I boasted to Rakitin that I gave an onion, but I’ll say it differently to you: in my whole life I’ve given just one little onion, that’s how much good I’ve done. (352–53)
In his otherwise insightful essay, “The God of Onions,” Gary Saul Morson opposes “practical reason and small acts of goodness. . . [which] do not seem terribly Christian or spiritual” to “pure faith, to which one clings in spite of all ‘opposite proofs.’” 3
Many modern Western literary critics take it for granted that faith is opposed to reason. 4 Morson’s comment on “pure faith” is his particular form of the “faith vs. reason” dichotomy. Morson also does not see how an Orthodox concept and practice of sobornost’ integrates the practical and the religious. 5 Even more explicit is the late, great Dostoevsky scholar Joseph Frank, who finds that the novel articulates the “conflict between reason and faith—faith now being understood very sharply as the irrational core of Christian commitment.” 6
This essay shows (1) that rejecting the “faith vs. reason” dichotomy creates room for a new understanding of the vision of The Brothers Karamazov and (2) that understanding the Karamazov vision as I do below resolves problems others have found in or imposed on the novel. Along the way, this essay shows what the “fragility of grace” 7 means in the Karamazov world. It concludes by proffering a claim that Dostoevsky also offers a vision of the actual world that portrays how we together can realistically (not fantastically) embody hope for the world, a vision that transcends individualistic materialism.
An Initial Problem
Dostoevsky claimed that two frequently anthologized chapters in Book 5 of his last and greatest novel—“Rebellion” and “The Grand Inquisitor”—are the “culminating point of the novel.” 8 These chapters are classics. Ivan Karamazov’s “Rebellion” is arguably the most powerful articulation of “the problem of evil” in modern literature. Ivan’s “Grand Inquisitor” portrays the tyranny to which institutional religion is liable.
At one point, Dostoevsky claimed in a letter to a friend, horrified at those chapters, that Book 6, “The Russian Monk,” was his answer to Ivan’s challenges. 9 Many students of the novel, including Joseph Frank, found that Ivan’s “protest against God on behalf of a suffering humanity” is unanswerable. 10 Yet after the novel was finished, Dostoevsky wrote to his editor that the novel as a whole was his answer to Ivan’s challenges. 11 Critics have not shown how the two answers are linked. These sorts of issues led me to understand a way to see how Dostoevsky’s two answers to Ivan are not merely connected, but inextricably intertwined.
Toward a Solution
My hypothesis is that The Brothers Karamazov responds to the three great questions that motivated Kant’s three great critiques. The Critique of Pure Reason was Kant’s answer to “What can I know?” The Critique of Practical Reason was one of Kant’s answers to “What ought I to do?” The Critique of Judgment includes Kant’s answers to “What may I hope?” 12 The novel works to undermine a deterministic materialist understanding of pure reason that results if one limits reasoning to First Critique reasoning. It also profoundly reconfigures the questions and answers that motivate practical reason and judgment under the influence of a Russian Orthodox concept of sobornost’. Sobornost’ is “a harmony between unity and freedom preserved in Orthodoxy since the early ages of Christianity.” It is “both the principle and the means of bringing together all aspects of human life and thus achieving its wholeness.” 13 It is both the process of building the human community in community with the Trinity and the community that is built. This analysis shows the link between the responses to Ivan’s challenges both in the novel and by the novel.
The present reading builds on the work of those who see Kantianism as setting a key problematic for Dostoevsky’s novel. While there is no evidence that Dostoevsky ever read Kant’s Critiques, he is known to have asked for The Critique of Pure Reason to be sent him while he was in exile in Siberia some three decades before writing The Brothers Karamazov. Moreover, Evgenia Cherkasova shows that Dostoevsky was clearly influenced by detailed reports on Kant’s philosophy and that German philosophy was widely discussed by Russian intellectuals of the time. 14
She attributes a “deontology of the heart” (which would, I suspect, perplex a Kantian) to Dostoevsky. Her work focuses only on morality, but does not note that “God and immortality,” two of Kant’s postulates of practical reason, are invoked twenty-one times in six separate episodes in the novel—Dostoevsky takes the third postulate, freedom, as a key issue throughout the novel. Steven Cassedy, in dialog with Iakov Emmanuilovich Golosovsker, Dostoevskii I Kant (not otherwise cited; it went through ten editions in Russian), helpfully discusses Dostoevsky as presenting differing antinomies of reason and faith; Cassedy finds Dostoevsky guilty of reveling in holding inconsistent beliefs, 15 a view that this essay challenges by using the refigurations of Kant’s critical questions and answers in The Brothers Karamazov to order the fundamental convictions exhibited in the novel. Cassedy also does not fully recognize the profoundly polyphonic 16 world Dostoevsky creates in his fiction, downplays the internal dialectic of characters in the novel, and tends to equate the author’s own views with the apparent inconsistencies of the novel. Robert Louis Jackson discusses Dostoevsky in relation to Kant and Schiller; he notes, “There is no evidence, however, that Dostoevsky clearly (if at all) distinguishes between the categories of the beautiful and the sublime.” 17 But then there is no reason to think that Dostoevsky knew the Critique of Judgment.
I am not arguing that Dostoevsky is making an argument for or against Kant. 18 Dostoevsky does not create a fictional world whose characters are mere ambling philosophical arguments. As Joseph Frank put it, Dostoevsky’s “technique had always been to refute the ideas he was combating ‘indirectly,’ that is, not by explicit argument but by dramatizing their consequences on the fate of the characters. Indeed, he felt that any head-on confrontation might well be counterproductive.” 19 This is not to deny that both Ivan and Zosima are “hero-ideologists”; their positions are developed both in internal and external dialogs, often with multiple interruptions, as Bakhtin notes in his discussion of “The Grand Inquisitor” in this context. 20 They articulate their ideologies, but rarely “straight out.” Dostoevsky’s characters do not merely say, but more importantly show, what it means to live according to certain ideas.
Ivan Karamazov: Undermining “First Critique” Materialism 21
Ivan is the materialist par excellence. He exemplifies an answer to the First Critique’s question, “What can I know?” within a strict materialism that one may read in The Critique of Pure Reason and its three-dimensional universe. The root of his materialism is his thoroughly Euclidean mind. In the chapter immediately before “Rebellion” and “The Grand Inquisitor,” Ivan proclaims his allegiance to Euclidean geometry: “if God exists, and if he indeed created the earth, then, as we know perfectly well, he created it in accordance with Euclidean geometry . . .” (235). He then refers to Lobachevskian geometry (known to the Russian intelligentsia of which Dostoevsky was a part). Ivan simply refuses to accept the possibility that any geometry other than Euclid’s is possible: “Let the parallel lines meet [at infinity] even before my own eyes: I shall look and say, yes, they meet, and still I will not accept it. That is my essence, Alyosha, that is my thesis” (236).
Ivan asserts a claim about all creation. 22 His human mind can think only of three spatial dimensions. The world has three spatial dimensions. So if God created the world, God created it in three spatial dimensions. Lobachevskian geometry is inconsistent with what he knows through his actual senses and thus cannot be real. If he saw the parallel lines meet at infinity, he would have to reject the evidence of his eyes.
Ivan explicitly denies the world of the spirit, although he seems truly to respect Father Zosima who has heard the turbulence of Ivan’s soul as he rejects belief in God and immortality (70). Yet hardly a gentle breeze, much less a stormy soul, appears in Ivan’s dialog with Alyosha as they are questioned by Fyodor:
“But still, tell me: is there a God or not? But seriously. I want to be serious now.”
“No, there is no God.”
“Alyosha, is there a God?”
“There is.”
“And is there immortality, Ivan? At least some kind, at least a little, a teeny-tiny one?”
“There is no immortality either.”
“Not of any kind?”
“Not of any kind.” . . .
“Alyosha, is there immortality?”
“There is.”
“Both God and immortality?”
“Both God and immortality. Immortality is in God.” (134)
The dialog goes on with Ivan denying the reality of the devil and Fyodor mostly agreeing with Ivan. On Ivan’s view, if humans have a soul, it is not immortal. And there is no God for a redeemed soul to be “in.” As “God, Freedom and Immortality” are the postulates necessary to getting Kant’s morality going, Ivan shows what it means to live as an individual who does not accept God or immortality. In sum, Ivan has no morality and cannot recognize the postulates of Kant’s second critique.
Ivan also discusses projection theories.
23
Later, he nuances his stance, but paradoxically. He refers to Voltaire, and probably was also influenced by Feuerbach.
24
He says:
As for me, I long ago decided not to think about whether man created God or God created man. . . . My task is to explain to you as quickly as possible my essence, that is, what sort of man I am, what I believe in, and what I hope for, is that right? And therefore I declare that I accept God pure and simple. . . . I have a Euclidean mind, an earthly mind, and therefore it is not for us to resolve things that are not of this world. And I advise you never to think about it, Alyosha my friend, and most especially about whether God exists or not. All such questions are completely unsuitable to a mind created with a concept of only three dimensions. And so I accept God . . . . [but] I do not accept this world of God’s, I do not admit it at all, although I know it exists. (235)
What Ivan gives with one hand, he takes back with another. Whether humanity created God or God created humanity is irrelevant. One cannot have evidence for alternatives like this. For him, that makes the issue undecidable. Either God is the product of humanity or humanity is the product of God. The point is not to try to resolve such an ultimate question. The point is to explain what is intelligible, the three-dimensional world in which we live, accessible to a materialistic pure reason. The God Ivan says he accepts may be a figment of our imagination or the creator of the world in which we live. No matter. He accepts either (or both or neither!).
Ivan is frequently pronounced to be an atheist. But his atheism is not a simple rejection of God. His materialist atheism is rooted in his “earthly mind” thinking in three dimensions. This mind cannot fathom how to think about anything beyond the material world. He does not believe in God or immortality (nor in freedom, as “The Grand Inquisitor” shows) not because there are good arguments against them, but because all arguments about the alleged realities that are beyond the scope of materialism are undecidable on the basis of evidence and thus not worth his time. He gives lip-service to the notion of God. The world he observes is rotten. But is there a final harmony that would assuage the brokenness of those who endure unbearable suffering and that they could accept? Ivan wishes it were true, but his materialism cannot and will not accept any wish that goes beyond the evidence.
Some critics tend to take Ivan as the embodiment of rationality. But given his fundamental statements about his mind, he is the embodiment of reductionistic materialism. He can be a paragon of reason only if materialism is the ultimate form of reasoning. Is it? I think not. Many scientists and historians who turn to ultimate questions simply transfer the presumption of atheism necessary for their work (i.e., God is not an object of their inquiries) into a metaphysical assumption (i.e., there is no God) without making an argument for the reasonableness of this translation. 25 Ivan assumes that his Euclidean geometry, proper for studying mid-sized inanimate things, applies universally. This is fundamentally the same unwarranted move as scientists’ and philosophers’ move from non-theistic procedural presumption to atheistic metaphysical assumption. Metaphysical claims require further warrant. If no further warrant is developed, then “freely assumed, freely denied” is the correct response. And Ivan offers no further warrant.
The key to seeing his irrationality is that Ivan holds profoundly inconsistent beliefs. All critics focus on Ivan’s rebellion, citing what is probably the most famous line in the novel: “It’s not that I don’t accept God, Alyosha, I just most respectfully return him the ticket” (345). 26 While some critics acknowledge that Ivan lives in a “Euclidean universe” and that he cannot accept God’s “Euclidean” creation, 27 no one notices that his commitment to Euclidean geometry is irrationally indefeasible. Even the evidence of his eyes could not defeat it.
It is just the possibility of alternative geometries that undermines the certainty typically associated with space as three-dimensional. Euclidean geometry is useful for everyday calculations regarding medium-sized objects, but it was recognized by mathematicians of Dostoevsky’s time that the universe might require more complex geometry. So Ivan asserts as certain an unwarranted presumption and that, in effect, he would hold two incompatible claims: that parallel lines do meet at infinity and that they do not. His commitment to reject the evidence of his own eyes, if that evidence would undermine his world view, marks Ivan’s commitment as being as absolute as any blind faith.
Dostoevsky sets Ivan’s challenges in his dialog with Alyosha in a tavern. Ivan describes the behavior of “Russian boys” in taverns: “Well, then, what are they going to argue about, seizing this moment in the tavern? About none other than the universal questions: is there a God, is there immortality? And those who do not believe in God, well, they will talk about socialism and anarchism, about transforming the whole of mankind according to a new order . . . .” (234). Alyosha seems to agree with Ivan in seeing the latter questions as “the same” as the former but approached from the other end. Yet these are questions about what to do in the world, not about what the world is. Of course, if one rejects all speculation, including that about a creator, then all one has left to talk of in the taverns where boys debate is the furniture of the world. One cannot talk of God.
How can a man so stubborn, inconsistent, and disingenuous represent the Kantian “first critique reason”? It is not merely in geometry that Ivan is inconsistent. He also later remarks that the devil who appeared to him was a projection of his imagination, yet says of the encounter, “That was no dream! No, I swear it was no dream, it all just happened!” (650). Ivan’s devil (that he does not believe in) eventually torments him into what appears to be a nervous breakdown. He has no way of deciding whether God is real or a projection; he has the same problem with the devil. 28
Because Ivan denies the realm of the spirit, he refuses not merely the ticket, but also God’s grace. Grace is the ticket. It comes in and through the community. The community for Dostoevsky is not constructed by individuals entering into a social contract, but is the shared common ground from which each person’s individuality and freedom develop. In refusing the ticket, he denies the graceful community which nurtured his own individuality. Grace is too fragile to exist in his materialist world.
This is one meaning of the “fragility of Grace.” Grace is not an irresistible power that can overcome human resistance in Dostoevsky’s world—or in ours. Someone like Ivan can “return the ticket,” that is, God’s grace in his life—and in his world—because he has reduced all reality to graceless matter and the blessed community to an assembly of individuals.
Ivan’s world view is fragmented. And this is the point. Dostoevsky is not arguing against materialism, but showing Ivan living with a fragmented mind. Obviously, whatever issues there are in Kant’s work, this is not a demonstration of Kant’s incoherence, but the incoherence of someone who takes the determinist and materialist understanding of the First Critique as the sum total of reason.
Alyosha Karamazov’s Realism: Revising “Practical Reason”
The second question that Dostoevsky answers differs from Kant’s: In Father Zosima, Alyosha Karamazov, and other characters, Dostoevsky shows “What are we to do?” Why “we?”
Robert Louis Jackson contrasts Alyosha’s final speech (774–75) with Ivan’s rebellion soliloquy (243–44):
Ivan’s speech is punctuated throughout by ‘I’ . . . . The pronoun ‘I’ and the Russian words for ‘my’ and ‘me,’ along with Russian verbs used in the first person (with the pronoun ‘I’ being understood) appear sixty-three times in a text of eighty-one lines! . . . Alyosha, in contrast, in a speech of almost identical length uses the plural ‘we’ and its variants (‘us,’ ‘our’), thirty-seven times. . . . ‘I’ in the twenty or so times it is used in Alyosha’s speech always interacts with ‘you’ [in the plural].
29
Jackson’s analysis lends textual support for the claim that Dostoevsky has Ivan and Alyosha take very different stances and that the “we” is crucial to understand what Dostoevsky is doing in his narration of Alyosha’s approach. Zosima and Alyosha affirm and (at least partially) show how the world could be a paradise if everyone were “guilty” before all and were forgiven by all (290, 362). 30 The “we” underlines the recognition that sobornost’ is necessarily a communal life and action. Participants must be willing to risk suffering for others. Such risk is reasonable if they are to have any possibility of realizing sobornost’ by being enactments of grace, whether by alleviating suffering, as Alyosha attempted to do when he intervened to protect a boy being stoned by others and the boy then biting him viciously on the finger (177–79); by solving problems; or by reconciling enemies. Such reconciliation requires not merely being “guilty” before all, but responsible to and for all. 31
Robert Louis Jackson notes that both Ivan and Alyosha recognize the suffering of children in the world: But their responses differ:
Both Ivan’s denunciatory peroration [in “Rebellion”] and Alyosha’s hortatory speech to the boys [the end of the epilogue] resolve around the suffering and death of a child: in the first case, a child torn to pieces by dogs in front of its mother; in the second, a boy, Ilyusha, humiliated, wounded unto death by people and circumstances. The suffering and death of a child, however, in both discourses inspires radically different conclusions on the part of the speakers. Ivan takes his case to heaven, while Alyosha brings his case down to earth. Ivan seeks to split Alyosha off from the elder Zosima and his faith. Alyosha finds in the drama and death of Ilyusha a meeting ground for union and communion among the boys and himself. Ivan returns his “ticket” to world harmony.
32
Ivan and Alyosha do not differ in their understandings of the world, but in their responses to it and their differing views on the possibility of grace in the world.
The goal of Karamazovian practical reason is not Kantian individual Glückseligkeit, but the shared, graceful happiness of sobornost’. Markel, Zosima’s brother, describes this realization just after his conversion: “life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we do not want to know it, and if we did want to know it, tomorrow there would be paradise the world over” (287–88). What practical reason requires is not merely individuals’ morally good actions, but putting into practice the realization that we together are empowered by divine grace to repair the fractured world.
Practical reasoners cannot merely observe the world. Rather the point is to restore the world as one restores a damaged icon. Alyosha’s practical reason is not simply “other than” Ivan’s reason. It acts to restore the world, perhaps not heroically, but “prosaically.” What Alyosha can do and Ivan cannot do is to work with others to solve real problems, to use his reasonableness to help to repair the world. Alyosha displays an alternative rationality rooted in the psychology and epistemology that is the “other” both to Ivan’s materialistic rationalism and to Kant’s moral individualism. Alyosha takes risks in order to realize the most important need of the repair of God’s defaced icon of the world: reconciliation. 33
In Book One, the narrator calls Alyosha a “realist”: “Some will say, perhaps, that red cheeks are quite compatible with both fanaticism and mysticism, but it seems to me that Alyosha was even more of a realist than the rest of us” (25). 34 He does believe in immortality and God. However, the narrator notes, “In just the same way, if he had decided that immortality and God do not exist, he would immediately have joined the atheists and socialists. . .” (26). In this comment, the narrator might be seen as signaling that Alyosha and Ivan are essentially similar, differing only with regard to belief in or rejection of God and immortality. While there is some truth to this, the differences between them are profound. Alyosha would have been quite a different sort of atheistic socialist from Ivan. Ivan is portrayed as a rebellious individual. Alyosha would have revolutionary comrades. As an “early lover of mankind” (18), were Alyosha a socialist, he would have to be something like a Zosima without faith working for “sobornost’ without God.” 35 He sees the world Ivan does, but acts in the world as Ivan does not and believes in more than Ivan can see.
Miracles are not the issue. Miracles will not bring a realistic person to faith. Skeptics will doubt their senses rather than believe a miracle has occurred. As the narrator puts it, “In the realist, faith is not born from miracles, but miracles from faith. Once the realist comes to believe, then, precisely because of his realism, he must also allow for miracles” (26). Alyosha is a realist who recognizes that Ivan’s material world is not all there is.
Before his death Father Zosima has sent Alyosha out of the monastery and into the world, not merely to observe and report on the world, but to act to resolve the problems and conflicts he sees. 36 Alyosha is constantly “in the fray” with others, attempting to resolve problems. For example, when he notices a small gang of schoolboys (176), he intervenes in their rock-throwing fight. He goes to talk with the one boy being stoned by six others, but for his troubles, he is hit by a stone the boy throws at him and is bitten “deeply, to the bone” (179) on his middle finger. He is even stabbed by a boy in the process of solving the children’s problems, an incident that eventually leads to reconciliation. 37 Alyosha exemplifies how to engage in “the much harder task of being kind to the person before us at every moment.” 38 Realism is antithetical to self-deception. Realists see clearly what there is, who others are, and who they themselves are. 39 Alyosha is a paradigm of Dostoevskian realism: a generous, practical, involved problem solver with eyes wide open to what is going on in the world and willing to risk repairing its ills. 40
Alyosha’s profound conversion experience seems to ground all of his later life, one rooted in a graceful love that generates both joy and commitment. The conversion is narrated in the short chapter “Cana of Galilee” (359–63); it is occasioned by Fr. Paissy’s reading the pericope from John’s gospel over Zosima’s coffin in a room so filled with the odor of putrefaction that the window had to be opened and a fresh breeze admitted (Zosima’s stench, that is, his not being preserved, appalled some of the monks who superstitiously believed that saints’ bodies would be preserved without decomposing). Yet Alyosha is overwhelmed by the sense of joy, that Jesus had turned water into wine out of love for the poor folk who could not afford enough wine and that in so doing he gave them joy. He sleeps, hears the late Fr. Zosima’s voice, and leaves the cell to throw himself on the earth:
He did not know why he was embracing it, he did not know why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss all of it, but he was kissing it, weeping, sobbing, and watering it with his tears, and he vowed ecstatically to love it, to love it unto ages of ages. “Water the earth with the tears of your joy and love those tears . . .,” rang in his soul. What was he weeping for? Oh, in his rapture he wept even for the stars that shone on him from the abyss, and “he was not ashamed of this ecstasy.” It was as if threads from all those innumerable worlds of God all came together in his soul, and it was trembling all over, “touching other worlds.” He wanted to forgive everyone and for everything, and to ask forgiveness, oh, not for himself! But for all and for everything, “as others are asking for me,” rang again in his soul. But with each moment he felt clearly and almost tangibly something as firm and immovable as this heavenly vault descend into his soul. Some sort of idea, as it were, was coming to reign in his mind – now for the whole of his life and into ages of ages. He fell to the earth a weak youth and rose up a fighter, steadfast for the rest of his life, and he knew it and felt it suddenly, in that very moment of his ecstasy. Never, never in all his life would Alyosha forget that moment. “Someone visited my soul in that hour,” he would say afterwards with firm belief in his words . . . (362–63).
Dostoevsky here portrays how grace came to Alyosha and either reinforced or brought about his commitment to the co-inherent community that nourished him, even extending sobornost’ to the natural world.
Realism is not merely open to grace, but is an embodiment, an enactment, of grace in the world. This is not to say graceful people are not also flawed, even sinners. No matter how hard one tries to repair broken relationships, to bring about reconciliation, one cannot always succeed.
This is the second meaning of “the fragility of grace.” Grace is risky in practice and not found “unmixed” or “in its pure state” in this world. Reconciliation is not guaranteed. Grace may fail, at least as far as we can see. Alyosha, and Zosima before him, are graceful agents of reconciliation in the world. But just as grace cannot overpower those who resist, so grace cannot offer any guarantees for success. 41 But a fragile grace gives room for hope that we can graciously realize sobornost’.
Dmitri and Grushenka: “Third Critique” Hope in and for the World
The third question that Dostoevsky asks and answers also differs from Kant’s: in the relationship between Dmitri and Grushenka and in the novel as a whole, Dostoevsky shows “what we can hope.” The hope that Kant identified was for individual “happiness” (der Glückseligkeit). According to Kant, one could become happy only if one were worthy of it. Happiness is necessarily connected to worthiness, achieved by carrying out the duty that is constituted by the moral law adumbrated in the second critique. The unworthy cannot really be happy. Like Kant, Father Zosima thinks people are made for happiness. But his account differs: “For people are created for happiness, and he who is completely happy can at once be deemed worthy of saying to himself: ‘I have fulfilled God’s commandment on this earth.’ All the righteous, all the saints all the holy martyrs were happy” (55). Why? Because they loved one another and thus fulfilled the whole law of Christ. The practical Christianity of Alyosha exemplifies this. But even more so does the love of Dmitri and Grushenka.
Richard Pevear characterizes Dmitri Karamazov as standing “‘in the dark’ at the exact center of [the novel]. He is the sensual man, impulsive and ‘poetic,’ the child of his father’s first marriage. He has two half-brothers who are equally his opposites: the atheist intellectual Ivan, and the quiet novice Alyosha” (xiv). Dmitri is involved in two love triangles. It would be quite an understatement to say that, through the first eight books of the novel, his behavior is erratic, emotional, spontaneous, even irrational. However, after the murder of his father, Grushenka’s avowal of her profound attachment to him, 42 his endurance of his three torments (his arrest for that murder, interrogation, and the production of “evidence” against him), his confession of his faults and sins, and his trial, Dmitri is a new man. His trial occurs months after his arrest, but in the interim, he changes. Dmitri says to Alyosha, “Brother, in these past two months I’ve sensed a new man in me, a new man has arisen in me! He was shut up inside me, but if it weren’t for this thunderbolt, he never would have appeared” (591). That new man cannot be alone: “I really cannot live without Grusha,” (595) whether he is to be sent to the mines as punishment for being found guilty of patricide or to escape, as Ivan had recommended, to America.
Grushenka is a realist. She is often seen as a wanton woman. When she was seventeen, she had a relationship with a Polish army officer who abandoned her. She had “remained in poverty and disgrace” (344). She was “rescued” by the merchant, Samsonov. The narrator describes her as “timid, shy, eighteen-year-old girl, delicate, thin, pensive, and sad,” (343–44) when she arrived in their town. The narrator summarizes her development: “Thus, in four years, from the sensitive, offended, and pitiful orphan, there emerged a red-cheeked, full-bodied Russian beauty, a woman of bold and determined character, proud and insolent, knowing the value of money, acquisitive, tight-fisted, and cautious, who by hook or crook had already succeeded, so they said, in knocking together a little fortune of her own” (344). She seems to allow men to exploit her, but throughout the first books of the novel, she effectively manipulates them. She is the object of the lust of many men, but none have any success with her.
Yet after Zosima’s death and disturbing putrefaction, she gets the duplicitous seminarian Rakitin to bring an “upset” Alyosha to her in order to seduce him. She playfully jumps on his lap, serves him champagne, and—surprisingly to Alyosha—does not arouse fear in him. But when she hears that Zosima has died that day, something profound happens:
‘Oh, Lord, I didn’t know!’ She crossed herself piously. ‘Lord, but what am I doing now, sitting on his lap!’ She suddenly gave a start as if in fright, jumped off his knees at once, and sat down on the sofa. Alyosha gave her a long, surprised look, and something seemed to light up in his face. ‘Rakitin,’ he suddenly said loudly and firmly, ‘don’t taunt me with having rebelled against my God. I don’t want to hold any anger against you, and therefore you be kinder, too. I’ve lost such a treasure as you never had, and you cannot judge me now. You’d do better to look here, at her: did you see how she spared me? I came here looking for a wicked soul—I was drawn to that, because I was low and wicked myself, but I found a true sister, I found a treasure—a loving soul . . . She spared me just now . . . I’m speaking of you, Agrafena Alexandrovna. You restored my soul just now.’ (351)
43
Both Grushenka and Zosima were treasures to Alyosha. And Grushenka admits her wickedness and begins to tell the tale of the onion with which we began.
Grushenka’s ability to restore Alyosha or sober up Dmitri is not something “earned.” She gives her love freely. It is in this love that happiness exists in the Karamazov world. It is the love of Zosima for Alyosha; of Grushenka for the brothers; of Dmitri for Grushenka that is the sign and reality of the fragile grace in the Karamazov world. Alas, Grushenka’s soliloquy, declaimed perhaps drunkenly just before Dmitri is arrested, is key:
Tomorrow the convent, but today we’ll dance. I want to be naughty, good people, what of it, God will forgive. If I were God I’d forgive all people: ‘My dear sinners, from now on I forgive you all.’ And I’ll go and ask forgiveness: ‘Forgive me, good people, I’m a foolish woman, that’s what.’ I’m a beast, that’s what. But I want to pray. I gave an onion. Wicked as I am, I want to pray! Mitya, let them dance, don’t interfere. Everyone in the world is good, every one of them. The world is a good place. We may be bad, but the world is a good place. We’re bad and good, both bad and good . . . No, tell me, let me ask you, all of you come here and I’ll ask you; tell me this, all of you: why am I so good? I am good, I’m very good . . . Tell me, then: why am I so good? (440; emphasis added).
This self-proclaimed wicked woman is also good. How can that be?
It is because she is a vehicle of grace for Alyosha and Dmitri. Grace is fragile, embodied in people whose actions are not always graceful. People who bear grace are not surely saints, perhaps not even holy. Because God’s grace acts through sinners—and we all are sinners—grace is never pure, but always appears in frail humans who can distort grace. Yet even if it is not pure, grace brings hope. We can hope for wholeness, sobornost’, in the world because God creates a world wherein true reconciliation can be realized. That is the Karamazov vision and our hope.
Yet Dmitri’s and Grushenka’ happiness is not Kantian. It is not earned. It is given them in and through their love for each other. One might even say that it is just the sort of miracle that Alyosha must be open to accepting and that Ivan could not: Dmitri becomes a new man. Their love shows truly how a fragile grace can appear in the world. It is not the preservation of saints’ bodies from putrefaction, but a more subtle, profound, even “natural” miracle.
For the third meaning of “the fragility of grace” is that grace is an unmerited gift given through love. Grace is as fragile and as chancy as love. Alyosha had received the gift of grace as a fighting love for the world after recognizing Grushenka as a “true sister . . . a loving soul” (351). Dmitri and Grushenka give each other graceful love. And the sometimes insightful Fyodor averred that “Ivan loves nobody” (175). Ivan placed himself beyond the pale of the community of grace.
Conclusion: “The novel . . . knows where it is going”
Sobornost’ is what The Brothers Karamazov hopes for. It is both the means and the end, the practice and result of reconciling the whole of human life in and through the divine life. 44 Sobornost’ connects “what ought we do” with “what may we hope.” Is ultimate reconciliation possible? If it is, then the realistic love that Zosima, Alyosha, Grushenka, and ultimately Dmitri show is not merely reasonable, but profoundly wise. Those who practice what we ought do are in position to hope for the realization of the “harsh and fearful” (58) love that is a constituent of sobornost’.
But such reconciliation is not perfect in practice nor certain to occur. In the epilogue, Grushenka and her rival for Dmitri’s affections, Katya, have a spiteful interaction. Katya had loved him for his “magnanimous heart” (766) even though he disgraced and insulted her. She forgives him and will provide means for his escape if needed. Grushenka refuses to forgive Katya who says “in a distorted voice” that Grushenka “‘did not forgive . . . I love her for that!’ . . . and her eyes flashed with savage wickedness” (767). Dmitri and Katya are portrayed as “frantic, almost senseless, and perhaps not even truthful . . . .” (766). None of these agents of grace are purely graceful. Alyosha comes closest, perhaps, as the character in the novel most like Christ. Christ was “like us in all things save sin,” and thus the only truly human agent who was also truly divine and thus whose grace was not mixed in with the faults, frailties, and foul deeds all other humans sadly indulge in. But even Alyosha and every disciple are not, like Christ, purely transparent to the divine light. We are all mixed blessings.
In the epilogue to the novel, the happiness of sobornost’ is nourished in the plans to save Dmitri. “A man sentenced to twenty years of penal servitude still intends to be happy—isn’t that pitiful?” says Alyosha (760). It is shown in Alyosha’s profound speech to the boys that have gathered at the stone in memory of the dead child Ilyusha where solidarity with each other and remembrance eternal of the dead are key.
45
This is the finale of the novel. It shows how to hope: in solidarity, in memory, and in liturgy. This is seen in the following, from “the speech at the stone”:
Let us never forget him, and may his memory be eternal and good in our hearts now and unto ages of ages!” “Yes, yes, eternal, eternal,” all the boys cried in their ringing voices, with deep feeling in their faces. “Let us remember his face, and his clothes, and his poor boots, and his little coffin, and his unfortunate, sinful father, and how he bravely rose up against the whole class for him!” “We will, we will remember!” the boys cried again, “he was brave, he was kind!” “Ah, how I loved him!” exclaimed Kolya. “Ah, children, ah, dear friends, do not be afraid of life! How good life is when you do something good and rightful!” “Yes, yes,” the boys repeated ecstatically. “Karamazov, we love you!” a voice, which seemed to be Kartashov’s, exclaimed irrepressibly. “We love you, we love you,” everyone joined in. Many had tears shining in their eyes. “Hurrah for Karamazov!” Kolya proclaimed ecstatically. “And memory eternal for the dead boy!” Alyosha added again, with feeling. “Memory eternal!” the boys again joined in. “Karamazov!” cried Kolya, “can it really be true as religion says, that we shall all rise from the dead, and come to life, and see one another again, and everyone, and Ilyushechka?” “Certainly we shall rise, certainly we shall see and gladly, joyfully tell one another all that has been,” Alyosha replied, half laughing, half in ecstasy. “Ah, how good that will be!” burst from Kolya. “Well, and now let’s end our speeches and go to his memorial dinner. Don’t be disturbed that we’ll be eating pancakes. It’s an ancient, eternal thing, and there’s good in that, too,” laughed Alyosha. “Well, let’s go! And we go like this now, hand in hand” (775–76).
And so they go off to the memorial dinner, exulting and calling out, “Hurray for Karamazov.”
As noted earlier, beyond his answer to Ivan’s challenges in Book Six, “The Russian Monk,” Dostoevsky seeks to use the novel as a whole as an answer. Robert Louis Jackson recognizes the polyphony in The Brothers Karamazov:
Seeks—because where we are involved with Dostoevsky versus Dostoevsky—and that is almost always the case in his major novels—there is not likely to be an answer, or voice, that definitively drowns out the other contending voices. As in a symphony or chorus, however, there are dominants and directions, and a sense of the whole picture. That whole picture constitutes a point of view. The novel, in its artistic unity, it might be said, knows where it is going.
46
Dostoevsky gave Ivan as profound a negation of God as is written anywhere. It refracted Dostoevsky’s own spiritual experience, a negation through which he lived. And yet he could hope that the world was a world of fragile grace, of the possibility of sobornost’.
But how can one have such a hope? “One” cannot. That’s the point. I believe Dostoevsky’s answer is that only if “we” live as Zosima and Alyosha portray actively and Dmitri and Grushenka portray devotedly can “we” have the hope that the novel as a whole conveys and that the final speech highlights. That is, the “small acts” and the “religious vision” are connected in the connections between and among people. The two answers to Ivan are not separate, but integrally intertwined. The practical repair of the defaced icon is what we ought to do and it is a sensible project only in the context of our shared hope for the world as a whole.
And this is the final “fragility of grace.” The great power of The Brothers Karamazov is that Ivan might be right—that the real world may well be as bleakly materialist and unloving as his world. Or it might become so. For while the whole novel is an answer to Ivan, it is not, pace Jackson, only a “point of view.” It is also a summons to action. For our world will be as Ivan sees it if we choose to live his way, if we refuse to accept and embody fragile grace. But as with the hope Alyosha and the boys generate in their commitment and memory, we can, if we would, live in solidarity. For that is the moral of the tale of the onion: “But the woman was wicked as wicked could be, and she began to kick them with her feet: ‘It’s me who’s getting pulled out, not you; it’s my onion, not yours.’ No sooner did she say it than the onion broke. And the woman fell back into the lake and is burning there to this day. And the angel wept and went away.” The fragile onion will hold us up if we hold us together. The novel instructs its readers about how we would live if we would not perish in suicidal 47 despair but live in hope. And to live we must live together, in freedom and unity, in reconciliation, in sobornost’ with God and even with all of God’s creation. That is true not merely of Dostoevsky’s vision of the world in The Brothers Karamazov, but also in the real world. In both, if we do what we ought then we become able to hope that fragile grace is not illusory, but operates through reconciling love in the real world, and to hope that grace is exercised in what we do with and for each other and the world despite the fact that it is invisible to Ivan the individual, but can be realized by the co-inherent community. To say “Hurray for Karamazov,” as the boys do at the end of the novel, is written as a chorale piece, not a solo aria. Hope for the world is possible if we realize it. Restoration of the defaced icon of the world, the first response to Ivan’s challenges, is possible if we have the vision to hope that we can be agents of God’s grace in the world God creates, the second answer to Ivan’s challenges. 48
Footnotes
1.
Dostoevsky claimed that this tale was a “gem” and told to him by a peasant woman. See Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts with Epilogue, translated and annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002 [first ed.: North Point, 1990]), 789, note 3 to 3.7.3 “An Onion.” Further references to the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation cited parenthetically in the text.
2.
After Fyodor has been murdered, Grushenka’s love for Dmitri emerges. One way of reading the earlier “love triangle” is that it was mostly in Fyodor’s mind (his lust for Grushenka); another is that she was trifling with Fyodor or with both Dmitri and Fyodor. Or perhaps both are possible. The context for the tale is a scene in which she abandons her plan to seduce Alyosha Karamazov, part of Dostoevsky’s development of her story—from an apparent “wanton woman” to a paragon of constancy.
3.
Gary Saul Morson, “The God of Onions: The Brothers Karamazov and the Mythic Prosaic,” in A New Word on The Brothers Karamazov, ed. Robert Louis Jackson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 108.
4.
In contrast, Rowan Williams has rightly claimed that “the tension in Dostoevsky is not straightforwardly between belief and unbelief. . . .” See his Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007), 223. Yet most literary critics I have read presume a reified understanding of “reason” and “faith” or “rationality” and “religion,” as in the title of a collection of essays, Between Rationality and Religion: Essays in Russian Literature and Culture by Joseph Frank (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). These critics presume that “reason” and “faith” are pitted against each other and that The Brothers Karamazov is simply another instance of this essential opposition. Many see the conflict between Ivan and Alyosha as showing the conflict between reason and faith, much to the detriment of “faith,” e.g., Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet 1871–1881 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2002; this is the fifth and final volume of Frank’s comprehensive study of Dostoevsky’s life and work), 607 et passim; and Scott M. Kenworthy, “Dostoevsky’s Religion,” (a review of Steven Cassedy, Dostoevsky’s Religion [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005]), Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75/2 (June 2007): 462, 
. Kenworthy reflects Cassedy’s approach as well. The assumption that faith is opposed to reason is a “profound structural characteristic of the ideological creativity of modern times” (to borrow Mikhail Bakhtin’s phrase used in another context from Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson [Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984], 82). Such critics tend to take reason as yielding Cartesian clear and distinct ideas or, more generally, well-warranted belief. They tend to take faith as ungrounded or unwarranted vague belief, often accepted blindly or on the authority of tradition.
I have elsewhere argued that such dichotomous reification of faith and reason is unsustainable (The Wisdom of Religious Commitment [Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1995]; Faith: What It Is and What It Isn’t [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2010]). I will not reassert those arguments here. I do claim that what Bakhtin calls the novel’s “irrevocable multi-voicedness and variovoicedness” (265) is relevant. The novel is a complex contrapuntal, multi-voiced fugue, in which Dostoevsky displays forms of reasoning in, around, through, in spite of, in opposition to, and out of explicit faith stances.
5.
Such integration is not unique to Orthodoxy. It is found in many communities. What is distinctive (again, not unique) is that sobornost’ is the community of the Trinity which creates the community in the world. See Konstantin G. Isupov, “Dostoevsky’s Transcendental Esthetic,” Russian Studies in Philosophy 50/3 (Winter 2011-12): 70, .
6.
Frank, The Mantle of the Prophet, 570.
7.
In brief, for Gregory Palamas, God’s grace is the uncreated energies of God which enlivens, transforms, and redeems humanity. Karl Rahner’s theology of grace can be seen as approaching an Orthodox view. For Rahner, the energy/presence of God (uncreated grace) is the source of “created grace.” Grace is never earned, but a free gift of God’s very self for both Palamas and Rahner—and for Dostoevsky. I agree with Robert L. Belknap, The Genesis of
8.
Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 426.
9.
Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of The Prophet, 457. Dostoevsky himself was unsure whether that answer would be sufficient.
10.
Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 604, 600; also see 696. Frank cites Vaclav Cerny, Essai sur le titanisme dans la poésie romantique accidentale entre 1815 et 1850 (Prague, 1935) in reading the novel as a protest against God on behalf of a suffering humanity.
11.
See Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 621–22.
12.
These questions are formulated in Critique of Pure Reason A805/B833; these and subsequent citations to this work follow standard convention of referring to the pagination in the original German first (A) edition (1781) and second (B) edition (1787).
13.
Marina Kostalevsky, Dostoevsky and Soloviev: The Art of Integral Vision (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 9.
14.
Evgenia Cherkasova, Dostoevsky and Kant: Dialogues on Ethics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 1ff.
15
Cassedy, Dostoevsky’s Religion, 84–113.
16.
This insight is found in Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, especially 222–24.
17.
Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 187–204; quotation at 190.
18.
If Dostoevsky were arguing against a philosopher, it would be against one who would ignore or reject the second and third critiques. The connections between the questions and the critiques are made explicit in Critique of Pure Reason A805-20/B833-47.
19.
Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 430.
20.
Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 278–79.
21.
“Atheist” is the narrator’s label for Ivan, but rather than use this negative signifier, a more comprehensive label is “materialist.” By the way he portrays his Euclidean mind (235), including his denying the existence of God, immortality and the devil (134), Ivan paints himself as a materialist. I also note that in a letter to his editor, N. A. Lyubimov 10 May 1879, Dostoevsky wrote that Ivan’s “convictions are precisely what I consider the synthesis of contemporary Russian anarchism. The rejection not of God but of the sense of His creation” (cited in Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Norton Critical Edition, trans. Constance Garnet, revised by Ralph E. Matlaw [New York: W. W. Norton, 1976], 757). Ivan cannot make sense of the world as a divine creation. He can and does consistently describe the world in materialistic terms.
22.
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant notes that “Space is a necessary a priori representation which underlies all outer intuitions” A24/B38. Even if “space” is universalizable, and thus a legitimate a priori concept on Kant’s view, three-dimensional space is not. That is Ivan’s basic error. Nonetheless, the problems multiple geometries create for a univocal understanding of “space” and especially the implications for Kant’s synthetic a priori were noted by F.C.S. Schiller, “Non-Euclidean Geometry and the Kantian a priori,” The Philosophical Review 5/2 (1896): 173–80 at 178–79, .
23.
For an argument about the appropriate use of projection theories to account for religious understanding, see Terrence W. Tilley, “Religious Understanding and Cultured Practices,” Varieties of Understanding: New Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology, ed. Stephen R. Grimm (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 253–73.
24.
Victor Terras, A Karamazov Companion: Commentary on the Genesis, Language, and Style of Dostoevsky’s Novel (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 183, note 177, remarks that Ivan “echoes an idea of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) which by the 1860s had become a cliché very much current among the Russian intelligentsia.”
25.
For an argument against this unwarranted move (with regard to historians in particular), see Terrence W. Tilley, History, Theology & Faith: Dissolving the Modern Problematic (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004), 38–39.
26.
In Russian, “ticket” is bilet. It has a broad semantic range. It “means any ticket, be it a train (or bus, or . . .) ticket or to a theater performance, or to a ball/banquet. Any right to enter or travel. A ball/banquet is mentally my choice when I read it, since it gives the right to participate, not to watch” (Larissa Volokhonsky, email to Diane and Larry Wellborn, May 29, 2013, in response to a question I asked). Of course, the meaning of Ivan’s refusing the ticket is underdetermined, but I agree with Volokhonsky that it is a refusal to participate, to interact, as Ivan is a tremendous observer who would have no reason to refuse a ticket to watch. This refusal is consistent with Ivan’s lack of active compassion. It also insulates Ivan from the possibility of grace, as grace in the Karamazov world is available to a person only in and through the community.
27.
For example, Malcolm Jones, Dostoevsky and the Dynamics of Religious Experience (London: Anthem, 2005), 118.
28
Kostalevsky, Dostoevsky and Soloviev, 168 appositely comments on the Kantian influence on the novel: The “pros and contras in the problematics of The Brothers Karamazov are resolved by the very plot of the novel, where Ivan Karamazov’s life appears as a search for truth.” But, pace Kostalevsky, it is a failed search and the present approach shows just why Dostoevsky portrays it as a failure: Ivan cannot even entertain the second and third great questions that Kant was driven to consider because Dostoevsky creates him with a mind limited to the bounds of a materialist reading of the First Critique.
29.
Robert Louis Jackson, “Alyosha’s Speech at the Stone: ‘The Whole Picture,’” A New Word on
30.
Also see Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction, 163. Malcolm Jones, Dostoevsky and the Dynamics of Religious Experience, 62, sees Dostoevsky as distancing himself from “the deeper reaches of Orthodox faith and practice.” He cites S. Hackel “The Religious Dimension: Vision or Evasion? Zosima’s Discourse in The Brothers Karamazov,” New Essays on
31.
Alain Toumayan, “I More than the Others: Dostoevsky and Levinas,” Yale French Studies, 104, Encounters with Levinas (2004): 56, . Toumayan notes the difficulty of this term: “Hence, in a variation that is, indeed, authorized by Dostoevsky’s text [Dostoevsky uses most frequently vinovatyi, which means both guilty and responsible], [Levinas] says that we are all ‘guilty’ or we are all ‘responsible,’ always underscoring the coda, ‘I more than all the others.’” Garnett’s translation uses “responsible” and that nuance should always be kept in mind when reading the phrase “guilty before all.”
32.
Robert Louis Jackson, “Alyosha’s Speech at the Stone,” 235–36. At 243 Jackson notes another contrast in that Alyosha focuses on the future, whereas Ivan focuses on the past. One cannot act alone or with others in the past, nor have hope for it.
33.
In The Disciples’ Jesus: Christology as a Reconciling Practice (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008), I argued that Jesus is centrally remembered by the community of his disciples as they engage in the practices of reconciliation he embodied with his first disciples.
34.
“Realism” is used here to differentiate Alyosha’s open-eyed and open-minded approach to live in contrast to otherworldly mysticism or Ivan’s dogmatic materialism.
35.
Morson, however, “The God of Onions,” pushes this intuition to the point of seriously misreading Alyosha. He finds that Alyosha is a utopian:
Alyosha thirsts for epic and saintly “exploits.” He wants to be a hero of the spirit, to witness and participate in the evident triumph of the Christian idea.
For Alyosha such exploits must be “immediate”: sudden, dramatic, visible, and unmistakable. And so he expects a miracle to honor Zosima ostentatiously, to silence all the doubters. In this expectation, Alyosha runs counter to the very teachings of Zosima himself (112).
Morson completely neglects Alyosha’s profound conversion experiences (329, 359–63) and the ways in which he carries on Zosima’s practice of prosaic, not heroic, Christianity; of living differently in this world, rather than expecting a different world; of engaging in “the much harder task of being kind to the person before us at every moment” (Morson, 112). If Alyosha were a heroic saint earlier on (for which I find little evidence other than the Markan “suddenness” in the narrator’s description of some exploits), that does not describe the mature Alyosha who carried out Zosima’s plan after his conversion—a conversion that reaches a climax in the chapter “Cana of Galilee,” immediately after the chapter quoted at the beginning of this paper, “An Onion.”
36.
The novel contrasts him with Ivan. Ivan is a meticulous “collector of certain little facts” (239) and a weaver of a “muddled poem” (262). Alyosha is an observant, involved problem solver.
37.
Other examples abound. Alyosha carries 200 rubles from Katerina Ivanovna (194) to Captain Snegiryov to try to compensate for Dmitri Karamazov’s insulting the Captain. Snegiryov refuses them (208–12), but Alyosha understands that accepting them would have violated Snegiryov’s honor and predicts that, having displayed his honor, will later take the money and use it well (214–17); and he does accept the money (517). As it turns out Snegiryov is the father of the boy who wounded Alyosha. Later in the novel, when Dmitri is wrongly adjudicated to be guilty of their father’s murder, Alyosha works to resolve the problem by conspiring with Dmitri, Katya, and Grushenka (both women earlier involved in love triangles with the Karamazovs; 757–68) to rescue Dmitri. Alyosha is consistently involved with seeing and solving problems in the real world. His realism is both open-eyed and practical.
38.
Morson, “The God of Onions,” 112.
39.
Fr. Zosima, Fr. Paissy, and Grushenka are other characters who fill out the realist type.
40.
Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction, 74 identifies “the twin enemies of a religious ‘realism’—timeless ecstatic acceptance on the one hand and neutral reportage of the world’s ‘being-toward-death’ on the other.” Ivan’s materialism embodies the stance of the second enemy. It is beyond the scope of this essay, but Dostoevsky is scathing in his portrayals of irrational people, including people “of faith” who embrace “timeless ecstatic acceptance,” that myopic panglossianism, as the essence of faith. Perhaps some such enemies of faith can be found in the novel’s audience.
41.
Jackson, “Alyosha’s Speech at the Stone,” for example, notes that the boys and Alyosha will have lapses and setbacks (243).
42.
When Dmitri is arrested, Grushenka confronts the officers:
‘Judge us together!’ Grushenka went on exclaiming frenziedly, still on her knees. ‘Punish us together, I’ll go with him now even to execution!’ ‘Grusha, my life, my blood, my holy one!’ Mitya threw himself on his knees beside her and caught her tightly in his arms. ‘Don’t believe her,’ he shouted, ‘she’s not guilty of anything, of any blood or anything!’ (457)
43.
Terras, A Karamazov Companion, 269 n. 78, writes that “the champagne party celebrating Alyosha’s fall [he had been thinking of eating some of Rakitin’s sausage earlier] turns into a moment of moral rebirth for Grushenka.” However the usually insightful Terras is misled here. While the importance and pattern of various conversions in the novel is not noted in the scholarly literature, I have found “conversion” one of the keys to the novel. Alyosha, however tempted and shaken, did not actually “fall.” This is not a conversion scene nor Grushenka’s moral rebirth. Rather, it is the difference between what Alyosha expected—from Grushenka’s reputation—and what he found: a woman so loving that she could restore him! Dmitri is the one who eats sausage and drinks vodka—in a quite different situation (379). Alyosha’s solidification of his conversion occurs in the next chapter “Cana of Galilee,” discussed above.
44.
See Jackson, “Alyosha’s Speech at the Stone,” 234.
45.
Isupov, “Dostoevsky’s Transcendental Esthetic,” 82 notes Dostoevsky’s “conviction that if mankind is to be saved, it must be a mankind of children, and the convocation of souls in salvation not an orgy of adults, but a Convocation of Children and a ‘child’s church’(M. Bakhtin).”
46.
Jackson, “Alyosha’s Speech at the Stone,” 234.
47.
Ivan declares that he expects to “drop the cup” of life when he turns thirty years old (230–31, 263–64).
48.
The author thanks those who have commented on earlier versions of this essay: Thomas Provenzola, Anthony Godzieba, J. Patrick Hornbeck II, Elizabeth A. Johnson, Dermot Lane, and anonymous referees for Theological Studies. What errors remain are the author’s alone.