Thoughts on Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov

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If somebody thinks this belongs in the reviews section, go ahead and move it. But what I’ve written has turned into nothing like a review.

In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, one of the characters says Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov “contains everything you need to know about life” (ignoring that the character thinks we need more than this!). Now, of course, all such statements shouldn’t be taken entirely seriously. But the meaning is clear. The book is, in a word, ambitious. There, of course, is the plot, which is interesting. But thats not what we here on ilovephilosophy care about is it?

So: the deeper stuff: a central theme is about the guilt of the entirety of mankind for every bad action, every base action, that humans commit. We are all unworthy in each others eyes, we are all in the position of judge over our fellow man. Life, as Dostoyevsky is fond of reminding us, is hard. The book contains an argument to the effect that the death of children disproves God. Horrible things happen to people without much comment. Within the book, this theme is illustrated by the collective guilt of the 3/4 brothers in the death of their, rather nasty, father. The brothers are, in a sense, presented as one complete character. They, collectively, exhaustively illustrate all that is good and base about mankind. But enough of discussion of the book itself, what really interests me is the character of Dostoyevsky himself.

Dostoyevsky, if the Brothers Karamazov is anything to go by, was far from a simple man. The book resists the temptation to provide us with a simple message, whereas for example Crime and Punishment is rather more clear about how he wants us to feel about Raskolnikov (turning towards God is his salvation). Its not that the same message isn’t present in this book, it is, but what we have here is a novel of far greater complexity and ambiguity. Powerful arguments against God, for nihilism, against organised religion, are presented. What is really fascinating about this book is that the intellectual answers Dostoyevsky seems to provide are awfully, and very obviously, inadequate. And he himself was fully aware of this. Quite simply, Dostoyevsky seems to accept that there exists no intellectual argument against atheism, nihilism, or any such doctrine. But argue against these doctrines he clearly does. How? By means of examples.

That is, to my mind, the entire point of the life of Ivan Karamazov. Like Raskolikov in many ways, but maybe without the superiority complex. His mental breakdown is presented as the ultimate consequence of an outlook of complete atheism and nihilism. Similarly, Mitya’s redemption and salvation comes in accepting God, accepting his abject guilt in the eyes of the rest of humanity.

How are we to evaluate these solutions? Well, at first sight, and without reading the novel, this comes across as abjectly sentimental. Many here will scoff at what is presented. But the, even partial, success of these solutions requires that Dostoyesvky convinces the reader that these characters, Mitya and Ivan, could actually exist i.e. an actual person of this type would suffer a similar fate. To my mind, he achieves a partial success. I fully believe that a position of complete atheism is not for everyone. Myself, I can happily live without a God. For others, the doctrine that ‘without God, all is permitted’ is repellent. Dostoyevsky is fully and completely committed to this doctrine. He just rejects that we are without God.

What I find really interesting, and the main point I wish to make, is exactly how far Dostoyevsky tread a similar intellectual path to Nietzsche. The similarities are many and obvious. Both abhor nihilism. Both would fully accept the doctrine that without God, all is lawful. Dostoyevsky fully recognises the force of Nietzschean-type arguments. Witness the utter distaste for the Catholic Church in Rome displayed throughout the book. Dostoyevsky, like Nietzsche, completely rejects any kind of ‘secular humanism’ where we treat all men as equals etc, without God. So: why the difference between the two? Why does Dostoyevsky accept God, and Nietzsche doesn’t? I think this is a very interesting question, in that both thinkers share, in certain respects, a very similar temperament. Can we bring in certain experiences in Dostoyevsky’s life (i.e. being a prisoner in Siberia)?

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Interesting thoughts. Ivan Karamazov is one of the great characters in literature, and also one that I identified with quite strongly when I read The Brothers Karamazov as a student. I similarly always loved and identified with Dostoevsky’s writings in general.

I think there are often apparently limited opportunities in terms of how people’s personalities interrelate with the kinds of philosophies that have been articulated within a coherent culture. For instance an early embracing of evolutionary theory by relatively unscientific laypeople likely correlated with people with a certain kind of personality - people who were noncomformists, liberal in thought, dissatisfied with the status quo, etc. A person who embraces evolutionary theory at this point in history might very likely have none of those personality traits. Christianity was so embedded in the cultures of both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky that I think that ways of contemplating and living life tended to look fairly binary. Leo Tolstoy’s existential crisis consisted of a very simple problem - His ‘head’ didn’t believe in God, but that made him miserable and inclined towards suicide. If he simply decided in some sense to believe in God he could go on living a productive and satisfying life, thus bringing his ‘heart’ into the picture.

If Nietzsche and Dostoevsky had certain similarities in thought and temperament, I also think they had clear differences. I think Nietzsche was the more radical thinker - a ‘bleeding edge’ type - who was willing to try thinking and living in a new way, and without the kind of social support that people typically rely on. He rejected herd mentality so completely that he realized very few of the benefits that can come from a truly social life. Dostoevsky seems to me to have been far more conservative in terms of his personality, if not in terms of his intellect. Ivan’s character has meaning for me as representing both a temperament and a worldview which is both more complex intellectually and therefore more modern than Tolstoy’s simple dilemma represents and at the same time more grounded in conventional realities than Nietzsche’s idealism disguised as naturalism.

Dostoevsky’s life experiences are certainly relevant to his philosophies and temperament. He consistently wrote in a way that was at once unapologetically exploratory yet grounded in concrete limitations. I don’t think it mere superficiality to correlate that style with his radical youth and later reactionary tendencies.

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Sorry I didn’t reply earlier.

This sounds sensible. It seems to me that Nietzsche was a man of firm convictions, he reached a viewpoint on the world and didn’t question it that much. He was a man who liked to question things, but once he’d reached his conclusions he really, in a lot of his books, just restated them. Dostoyevsky is a man who never, really, reached any conclusion he was satisfied with. Yes, he settled on conservative political and orthodox religious views, but he’s still questioning them in the Brothers Karamazov. As a novelist I suppose he had more license than Nietzsche to offer opposing views, but it is clear that he is unclear about where he stands. Actually, thats not quite right, he knows where he stands, but he has a hard time justifying it to himself intellectually.

I think, if we’re talking about the kind of life they both advocate, Dostoyevsky is more realistic. It’s not that Dostoyevsky ever explicitly rejects the notion that an overman type person could exist, thats one of the fundamental unresolved questions in Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov was no Napoleon, but that isn’t an argument against the type of the overman. But he certainly views a large part of mankind as weak. Thats the appeal of the Grand Inquisitor. At any rate, I think Dostoyevsky is surely correct that most people are too weak to go ‘beyond good and evil’.

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There is an interesting essay by Nathan Rosen included in the “Norton Critical Edition” of the novel, called “Style and Structure in The Brothers Karamazov”, which is I think primarily concerned with recontextualizing The Grand Inquisitor with the novel as a whole and also with Dostoevsky’s general attitudes and ideas. So that might interest you.

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Have you read Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky?

I’ve bought it, and I’ll read it when I get around to it. I’ve heard that he was a good influential writer, so I’m waiting until I finish Charles Dickens, so I can read it.

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I quite like Crime and Punishment, but I think the Brothers Karamazov is a superior novel. I never could get that excited about Raskolnikov.

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Well, you asked for life experiences so here are some.

In response to, “Both would fully accept the doctrine that without God, all is lawful.” Would Dostoevsky really? Political nihlists were commiting terrorist acts durring Dostoevsky’s time, inspired by a certain influential writer of the time to whom Dostoevsky made a personal visit to. He plead with the man if he could not just say a word to end the violence. Dostoevsky knew the writer was a secular, atheistic political nihilist. He came anyway. If he really harbored the idea that without god all is permitted–the famous line Ivan makes–would he expect the writer he came to visit to say anything to stop the violence?

Your assement about D’s attacks on the Catholic church and secular humanism are spot on. I would only add to your original post that Dostoevsky meant Father Zossima to be the counter example–the one he endorsed–to the Grand Inquisitor and Ivan Karamazov. God apart, Father Zossima provides a philosophy of being guilty before everyone (the common translation is responsible for everyone, but in the Russian, it is guilty) and endorsing a philosophy of active love. Not romantic love like his hero Alyosha almost succumbs to; not the passion of Dimitri; not the intellectualizing of Ivan who speaks about the harm to children, provides deep and provocative philosophical arguments using crimes against children as examples, but in his literary, that is, real life, does nothing. A terrible character, though admirable for certain traits: an intellectual, polite, philosophic… Doesn’t even help his own brother. A social darwinist, “let one serpent devour the other.” No, Ivan never gets involved himself – not even in his own family.

Nevertheless, do not misinterpt me as being against Ivan’s philosophic arguments. But Doestoevsky, at least according to my recent professor who teaches a course on the man, a die-hard zeolot if I’ve ever met one, defending D to the teeth, attempts to undermine Ivan’s arguments through ad hominims on his character. Who knows if this is what D also attempted, he did try the same trick in C & P and The Possessed afterall. Perhaps why he was not a philosopher but a novelist, one whom, unfortunatly, I like a lot less after studying him closely and deconstructing (de-structuring) some of his major work.

But damn do I love Underground and Brothers K.

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This is interesting. I’m well versed in Dostoyevsky the writer but I don’t know much beyond bland biography about the man. I have read of supposed disconnect between his fiction and non-fiction writing. There are two propositions; ‘without belief in God all is lawful’ and ‘without the existence of God all is lawful’. Certainly some of his writing supports the former stronger one. The latter one is a bit of a non-statement when you believe as strongly as he seemed to.

I suppose it is a great pity that he died before he could continue with Alyosha’s journey as he seemed to want to do. As it is the story is incomplete. Yes you’re spot on about Zosima, if I didn’t mention that in my original post I should have.

RE ad hominems, yes. Really my take on it is that Dostoyevsky knew just how strong the arguments he put into the characters espousing these views hostile to his own were. He must have done, he devised some of them. His opponents couldn’t have done better than the Grand Inquisitor. And what of the philosophy in Notes from the Underground? And he also knew his rebuttals were largely ineffective. His attempts to answer are by means of his portraits of the characters possessing these repellent views. What about the protagonist in Notes? He is pathetic, contemptible, barely a man for all his grand posturing. What of Raskolnikov? He doesn’t have as much strength as he thinks he does. Really, D doesn’t come close to achieving his goal with Raskolnikov, his conversion is utterly unbelievable and a complete artistic failure. But then there is the Brothers K, which makes a start in the right direction.

The Brothers Karamozov stands far above his other work for me.

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We definitely agree as to Dostoevsky’s artistic merits. I also believe The Brother’s Karamazov to be his best work and greatest artistic achievement, followed by The Idiot (which unfortunately I have not read to its end, but nevertheless believe it to be second best) and lastly, Notes. Your analysis is once again spot on: Dostoevsky resorted to ad homs to undermine the philosophies in the characters he did not personally endorse. Having read Notes seven times, and shall continue to re-read more times throughout my life, I have discovered, in my latest reading, that to a very large degree Dostoevsky was successful in undermining his narrator’s philosophy. To be sure, the narrator of notes would call me a coward for turning away from his idealism with a dose of pragmatism, but given the gruesome and pathetic portrait of that character, whose black interior Dostoevsky laid bare for the reader to see . . . I can live with it. I wrote an essay on Notes that will really flesh out my argument – I’ll post it up here in a second. Please do take a look and tell me what you think.

As for Rodya’s conversion – the hot topic of C & P – I used to be on your side. Even though the first time I had read Crime and Punishment, considering that I knew Dostoevsky was a Christian, considering that in part I there is Marmaladov’s Christian soliloquy foreshadowing and setting up a literary motif for the rest of the novel, I was not surprised. Nabokov’s criticism is really off on this one (which I’ve read and studied closely). Upon further exploration, with the help of some interesting literary criticism provided by the critic Gibbon with regard to the symbolic structures of the text that pave the way for the conversion in the epilogue, I no longer find the epilogue pulled out of the sky. Yet such is the problem that most people including even eminent Christian critics have. I might post that essay up in the future.

This is Dostoevsky’s pattern though. To undermine a philosophy whether it be of the Rational Egoists, Catholics, Social Radicals (Ivan, especially considering the opening scene with Zosima), Nihilists and Supermen, Dostoevsky will show the man to be a wretch and by extension I suppose the wretchedness of the man’s philosophy. Nevertheless, for sheer psychological insight, (on which the literary critic Joseph Frank wrote five volumes of analysis), great philosophical themes fleshed out and all around dark 19th century wretched characters, Dostoevsky’s work remains a must read.

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Isn’t this a question of Dostoevsky’s Slavophilia, wherein he embraced a particular type of Christianity - Orthodoxy? I’m surprised this hasn’t been mentioned, as it might help to understand the difference with Nietzsche, whose religious context was more modern and therefore complicit with the age of nihilism. I am no expert, but I throw the idea out there as it might inspire some thoughts in those better versed.

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Well, yes and no Matty. Dostoevsky in his non-fiction writing sounds very modern to me (he did not float around in an Orthodox bubble). He was well aware of the secular world and the utopians, socialists, nihilists (Turgenev was his contemporary after all) Rational Egoists and European individualism. He hated all of it. He wrote essays against European individualism (and in C & P he gave it artistic form in the shape of Raskolnikov’s final dream that he had during Lent, about non-other than, a rational plague taking over people’s minds, or something like that; I’ll post the passage up when I get home and have a free minute).

Dostoevsky was a nationalist xenophobic anti-Semitic right-wing conservative. I mean really right-wing, he thought Russia would become the great Christian model to the rest of the world and would be able to do so because of its unique distinction of having, peasant communes! So yes, a total Slavophile but not unaware of what was going on around him, he was just reacting against it based on his own Slavophilic ideology.

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That’s kind of my point, though - I don’t deny Dostoevsky was well versed in modern thought, most of the Slavophiles were, but that his Slavophilia and his Orthodoxy explain why he adopts the response to it he did, which involved a return to lost values, whereas Nietzsche sought to overcome Christian modernity through transvaluation. It strikes me that the nature of the Orthodox reaction to Catholic Christianity has been very poorly understood by Western intellectuals and that it was very different in outlook to the Protestant Reformation.

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I read it about a thousand years ago and one point is clear, all the brothers are a certain
type of RUSSIANS and that cannot be emphasized enough. They are not westerners. they
come from a far different tradition than those in the west. They don’t speak to universal themes
as much as distinctly Russian themes.

Kropotkin

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Matty,

I completely agree with everything you said. By the way, great essay on Derrida. You have no idea how badly I needed that explained to me, it was driving me crazy for over a year. Thank you!

Peter,

I disagree with you. Although all of Dostoevsky’s works are within the context of 19th century Russia, this does not mean that there are no universal themes embedded within the texts. Once more, back to what IrvingWashington and I were discussing, philosophical themes are set apart from the individuals who hold them. And there is plenty of philosophy within Dostoevsky. Furthermore, a lot of people in contemporary times, from various backgrounds, of both genders, are able to identify with, relate to, and take from, the various characters within Dostoevsky’s works, major and minor. Especially from The Brothers Karamazov.

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The essay on “Differance”? That’s extremely gratifying to hear, if so, seeing as the exact purpose of that blog is to provide as clear and precise an explanation as possible of some key Derridean texts. Hopefully more to come in the fullness of time!

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Does this explain any of the resolutions D offers to the problems brought up in the book?