The Brothers Karamazov

This runs against what many readers, following the influential Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, have seen as the principal distinguishing feature of Dostoevsky’s major novels, and The Brothers Karamazov in particular. Bakhtin called the Dostoevskian novel ‘polyphonic’. One of the things he meant by this is that each voice in the book has equal weight in an ongoing dialogue, including the author’s. Nowadays we should be more inclined to say ‘including the narrator’s’ in order not to confuse the voice of Dostoevsky’s narrator (itself a fictional construct) with his own. Bakhtin argues that this constitutes a major revolution in the history of the novel. Most other novels are ‘monologic’ in the sense that the voices of the characters are evidently subordinated to a single consciousness which we usually identify with that of the author. As a matter of fact (as Terras explains), Dostoevsky’s narrator himself exhibits here two fundamentally incompatible voices: a local resident who is realistic and sceptical, and an omniscient narrator who is an idealist and a believer, and who knows things about the characters’ thoughts which the resident could not possibly know. The reader may notice that in the former mode the narrator displays all sorts of stylistic awkwardness. Although the permissible limits of stylistic awkwardness are not the same in English as in Russian, the translators of this much-acclaimed English version have endeavoured to retain his idiosyncratic prose, thereby preserving much of the humour and distinctive voicing of the novel.

There has of course been much dispute about Bakhtin’s thesis, but it has proved a very powerful tool when applied to Dostoevsky’s major novels. They do privilege free dialogue in a more radical way than we find in any of Dostoevsky’s predecessors or contemporaries. One thing about which there is no doubt is that each of the major characters has a distinct and distinctive personality and with it an individual voice of his or her own. Although it is claimed that each of the brothers has something of the Karamazov inheritance, they are so different from each other that some critics have been tempted to see in them three basic human types, roughly defined as the sensual (Dmitri), the spiritual (Alyosha) and the intellectual (Ivan).

It is true that Dmitri seems to have inherited sensuality from his father, but he has none of his father’s low meanness. On the contrary, Dmitri is notable for his idealism, his sense of honour and his wrestling with the idea of two kinds of beauty — the beauty of Sodom and the beauty of the Madonna. He complains that people are so complex that a thirst for both types of beauty can coexist within them.

In spite of his own misgivings, Alyosha appears to have very little of his father’s sensuality and what he has seems, as the critic Frank Seeley argues, to have been sublimated: ‘Alyosha is predominantly his mother’s son.’ To the reader of Dostoevsky’s earlier novels he follows in that tradition of ‘saintly’ characters which include Sonya Marmeladova (Crime and Punishment), Myshkin (The Idiot), Shatov (The Possessed) and Makar (A Raw Youth). He is, however, healthier and less complicated than any of his predecessors, though he shares with them a certain immediacy and childlikeness of response, insight into the hidden thoughts of others, compassion and humility.

Ivan’s relationship to his father is seen differently by different people. Fyodor does not see himself in Ivan and Ivan loathes and rejects the old man. Ivan certainly experiences a love of life but, above all, his energies are channelled into thought, a thought racked with his own inner contradictions based, one would surmise, on his repression of the Karamazov inheritance. However that may be, Ivan is doomed to neurotic inactivity and indecision in the world of action.