The Icon and the Axe

In his last journalistic writings-and particularly his speech dedicating the Pushkin memorial in the last year of his life-Dostoevsky plays anew with the seductive idea that the Russian people carry within themselves a unique consciousness of the reconciling qualities of Christianity. He speaks of the "Russian idea" of universal reconciliation through love and suffering as an antidote to the "Geneva idea" of organized theocracy. In the West generally "all is now strife and logic," driven on by "the dream of Rothschild," the thirst for wealth and power.

The idea that Russia was the bearer of some new Christ-like harmony among the nations is often extrapolated from his works as the essence of Dostoevsky's "message." Yet it would be more accurate to speak of it as his private version of the myth-common to populists and Pan-Slavs alike- of a special path of Russian development that would redeem the errors of recent Western history. He loved the idea, but his belief in it-like that of Shatov, its most articulate fictional exponent-was hypothetical, even "wavering." Sometimes-particularly in his Diary of a Writer-Dostoevsky's position seems chauvinistic, and he is usually characterized as an extreme conservative. But he is not at all interested in preserving the status quo, let alone returning to some idealized past. He is merely opposed to the "less real" ideals of the political and industrial revolutionaries. He is a counter-revolutionary in De Maistre's sense that a "contre-revolution ne sera point une revolution contraire mais le contraire de la revolution."2* But Dostoevsky was not primarily a social theorist or philosopher but a master of suspense, a novelist of dramatic temperament. Thus, it is best to look to his novels-and above all to The Brothers Karamazov, his last one -for such "answers" as Dostoevsky may have sought to provide in this age of agonized agitation and social messages.

In The Possessed we are led to believe that the entire intelligentsia is possessed, that Verkhovensky and Stavrogin are the true and logical heirs of Stepan Trofimovich. There is no way out, and Stepan Trofimovieh's last repentant wanderings are even less convincing than Raskolnikov's final "conversion" in Crime and Punishment. In The Brothers, however, Dostoevsky, unlike Musorgsky, is able to end on a note of hope, without either the melodramatic deus ex machina of eleventh-hour repentance and conversion or the romantic blending of religion with nationalism. Dostoevsky had experimented earlier with both answers, and there is both a melodramatic murder and a romantic image of the "Russian monk" at the center of The Brothers. But both the "repentance" and the "conversion" of the Karamazovs is incomplete and unconventional.

Yet Dostoevsky does conclude that man can eliminate the need for salvation by raising himself to the level of a superman for whom "all is permissible" since there is no God. The idea of a new breed of men "beyond good and evil" motivated the ideological murder by Raskolnikov and ideological suicide by Kirillov and lies behind much of Ivan Karamazov's thinking about the central crime in The Brothers. Yet Ivan is a tortured figure who comes close to the madness that was so characteristic of the age. Ivan wants to believe in God but is visited only by the devil; and there is, seemingly, no way out.

But Ivan is only one of three brothers, all of whom share in the common crime of patricide. The name of Smerdiakov, the illegitimate fourth brother who actually commits the crime, suggests the word for "stink" (smerdet'); and the word Karamazov is a compound of words meaning "black" (Tatar kara) and "grease" {maz'). Like Sophocles in Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare in King Lear, Dostoevsky's drama deals with injustice to one's father. Yet unlike these, The Brothers Karamazov is not a tragedy. None of the three brothers dies; and the story sounds a final message of

redemption.

Essential to any understanding of this "message" is the fact that it is conveyed dramatically and not didactically. The "Legend" in itself solves nothing for Dostoevsky-although it may for those who read it and take sides between the protagonists. It occurs relatively early in the novel and is itself an episode in the confrontation of the two extremes among the brothers: the humble Alyosha and the proud, intellectual Ivan. The movement toward resolution of this familiar Dostoevskian antinomy proceeds through the third brother, Dmitry, the most original creation of the novel. Dmitry is closest to the crime and is put on trial for it-thereby becoming the focus for most of the drama.

Dostoevsky's allusions to dramatists help us to understand Dmitry's