The Brothers Karamazov

The novel contains over eighty quotations from the Bible alone. Over forty different sources are mentioned or quoted by Ivan in ‘The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor’. In addition quotations from hagiography and religious folklore, Pushkin, Schiller, Shakespeare, Nekrasov, Herzen, Pecherin, Polezhaev and others, not to mention contemporary journalism, abound throughout the novel. The end-notes to this edition will indicate the sources of some of them. But, as Nina Perlina has pointed out, their significance does not end with their place in the text or the associations they may have in our memories of their sources. Sometimes, for example, sources are reaccen-tuated and misquoted, and this may play an important role in characterization. Perlina notes that in his drafts to Part I of the novel, Dostoevsky wrote,

Most important... the landowner quotes from the Gospel and makes a crude mistake. Miusov corrects him and he makes even worse errors. Even the scholar makes mistakes. No-one knows the Gospel. ‘Blessed is the womb that bore thee,’ ... said Christ... It is not Christ who said that ...

Sometimes, of course, there is no quotation or overt allusion, but the well-read reader will catch the tones of other texts, and the likeness is so compelling one suspects that such texts have served Dostoevsky as models, even unconsciously. Hackel’s view that Dostoevsky must have modelled his presentation of Zosima in part on the Bishop Bienvenu in Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables is based partly on such intuitions and partly on Dostoevsky’s known admiration for the book.

The result of such techniques is that the reader’s mind is encouraged to stray from the path of the narrative and to reflect on connections, parallels, echoes, both within the text and without. The narrator’s own inadequacies and uncertainties also encourage this. But the more one ponders the novel the more one realizes that one is dealing with layer upon layer of text, of voice echoing other voices and not with a single reliable ‘true’ version of events or of life. The sections of the book which purport to lay bare the truth in one form or other (‘The Legend’, Zosima’s testament, the trial) seem to exhibit this most clearly. ‘The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor’, for example, that mighty myth of modern times, is presented as a poem, not to be taken literally, never written down, and recalled by one of the characters in conversation with another. How the narrator got hold of it in all its detail is never explained. Zosima’s discourse is introduced by the narrator, but it appears to be his account of Alyosha’s recollections of fragments of conversations with Zosima over a period of time. This itself contains recollections of fragments of conversations with Markel and the mysterious visitor. The mysterious visitor, in turn, talks about his own past experiences. And so on. As for the trial, the inadequacy of every account — the prosecutor’s, the defence counsel’s, the witnesses’ — to the evidence with which the reader is acquainted simply underlines their provisional nature.

This is why Nathalie Sarraute, an exponent of the French nouveau roman, could write,

The time had long passed when a Proust could believe that ‘in pushing his powers of penetration to their limits’ he could ‘attempt to reach those far depths where truth, the ultimate reality, our authentic experience reside.’ Everyone now knew, enlightened by successive deceptions, that there is no such thing as ultimate reality. ‘Our authentic experience has been revealed as a multiplicity of depths and these depths go on to infinity.’

It is to this vision that she assimilates Dostoevsky which is not to say, of course, that he was unconcerned with truth to life in the social sphere. That he consulted experts in matters of theology, psychology (Ivan’s nightmare) and legal procedure (the trial) is well attested. It does, however, point to the diversity of possible interpretations.

Many of these interpretations can be found in the critical literature on the novel. There are many general books on Dostoevsky’s life and work. Konstantin Mochulsky’s scholarly but highly readable work is still rightly regarded by many as the classic work of its kind. More recent is Richard Peace’s fine book which provides an excellent reading of The Brothers Karamazov. It is notable, among other things, for its treatment of the tradition of the Russian Old Believers in Dostoevsky’s novel. And, although it certainly cannot be regarded as an introductory study, no list of works on Dostoevsky nowadays should fail to draw attention to Bakhtin’s seminal book, which has probably been more influential than any other, not only on Dostoevsky studies but on literary studies in general.