The Brothers Karamazov

In curious ways the theme of parricide haunted Dostoevsky all his life. As a boy he had been fascinated by Schiller’s play The Robbers. In 1838 he entered the Engineering Academy in St Petersburg, housed in the building where the Emperor Paul had been murdered, some believed with the collusion of the future Alexander I. In 1839 Dostoevsky’s father died, presumed murdered by his serfs, and though Dostoevsky certainly had no hand in it, and there is even doubt about whether it was murder at all, the point is that he always believed in the murder story and perhaps felt guilty about his absence at the time. Freud certainly associates this event with the working out of the Oedipus complex in Dostoevsky’s life and work, as also the metaphorical threat to the Tsar implicit in his association with the Utopian socialists in the forties, for which Dostoevsky accepted punishment in Siberia. Late in life he returned to The Robbers which he read to his young children and to which their are allusions in The Brothers Karamazov. Most important of all for the plot of the novel was an encounter in Siberia with a convict called Ilinsky, who served ten years for the murder of his father, before the real murderers confessed and he was exonerated. At the time of his trial he had denied all knowledge of the crime though the evidence was overwhelming. Dostoevsky was convinced of Ilinsky’s innocence after meeting him.

Yet in each case one is struck more by the fascination than by the reality, and in each there is a certain distance between Dostoevsky and the act of parricide. Either we are dealing with fiction ( The Robbers or George Sand’s Mauprat which also has striking parallels with the plot of Dostoevsky’s novel), or doubt and error (Alexander I seems not to have known about the intention of killing his father; Dostoevsky certainly had no hand in his father’s death, which may not even have been murder; he never had any intention of assassinating the Tsar; Ilinsky was actually innocent).

So it is with the novel. Guilt and guilt feelings vaguely motivate the action of all rather than focus on the one who physically committed the crime. Is there parricide at all? Assuming Dmitri did not commit the deed and Smerdyakov did: is Dmitri still in some sense morally culpable? Is Smerdyakov definitely Fyodor Karamazov’s son? Is not Ivan in some sense to blame? Is not even Alyosha guilty of dereliction? Is not everybody, in Zosima’s words, in some sense guilty for everything?

So we find ourselves drawn from our focus on the murder story to questions of moral responsibility and guilt, complicity and collusion. We also find ourselves drawn into Ivan Karamazov’s thinking about religion: is his rejection of God not a sort of religious parricide, a killing in his own mind of the Divine Father, reminding us of the nearly contemporaneous claim by Nietzsche that God is dead? Similarly we find ourselves thinking about whether Fyodor Karamazov brought his death upon himself, about his treatment of his wives and the Karamazov children, of innocent suffering (the source of Ivan Karamazov’s rebellion and the stories he gathers from the newspapers). The very nature of fatherhood is discussed at the trial itself, reflecting another of Dostoevsky’s long-term ambitions, to write a novel about children.

The reader who reads exclusively for the excitement of the story may of course become impatient with, or even skip, Books Five and Six. But for Dostoevsky they were the heart of the novel. Ivan’s rebellion against God and his ‘Legend of the Grand Inquisitor’ have been widely read as an immensely powerful indictment of Christianity on the one hand and as a uniquely prescient analysis of totalitarianism on the other.

Dostoevsky believed that Ivan’s rebellion against God was much more devastating than any case contemporary left-wing intellectuals had managed to assemble. The text speaks for itself. By marshalling a series of anecdotes illustrating the suffering inflicted by adults on innocent children (child abuse as we have come to call it) Ivan reaches the conclusion that he cannot accept God’s world and that if such suffering is the price of entry into paradise then (echoing Schiller here) he respectfully returns the entry ticket. He does not at this point deny the existence of God as he does elsewhere in the text; he revolts against the order of the universe out of compassion for the suffering of little children. In letters to N. A. Liubimov, his editor, and to Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Dostoevsky insists that Ivan’s blasphemous arguments are to be refuted later in the novel. Clearly, he was anxious that the censor, the publisher (M. N. Katkov) or the editor might refuse publication. But as time went on, Dostoevsky found the task of refuting them through Zosima increasingly taxing.