The Icon and the Axe

curious nature. Shakespeare was to Dostoevsky not merely a writer but "a prophet sent by God to proclaim to us the mystery of man and of the human soul"; and much of that mystery was for Dostoevsky contained in Hamlet, to which there are many allusions in The Brothers. One of the most important of these occurs at the climax of the prosecutor's summary at the trial of Dmitry, where he contrasts "Hamlets" to "Karamazovs." The immediate usage is ironic; but in the "echo" of this contrast which is sounded in the courtroom discussions, it becomes clear that Dostoevsky was contrasting intellectualized "liberal" Europe with spontaneous, earthy Russia. For the former, life itself is problematic and all questions are "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought"; for the latter there is a passionate love of life that lives for and fathoms each immediate experience. Dmitry is related to Demeter, the goddess of the earth; he is the pochvennik incarnate, a lover of the immediate and spontaneous. Dmitry and the peasants in the audience "stand firm" not only against the half-lies of witnesses and judges but against the whole artificial, casuistic procedure of human trial itself.

Dmitry's vibrance and honesty at the trial is not just a reflection of his "broad Russian nature" but also of the half-hidden influence on Dostoevsky of the dramatist who made perhaps the greatest impact on him of any single literary figure: Friedrich Schiller.29 The Brothers is saturated with borrowings and citations from Schiller-particularly from those hymns to human freedom and perfectibility: The Robbers and the "Ode to Joy." For his last and loftiest work, Dostoevsky returns, involuntarily perhaps, to this influence of early youth and subsequent source of inspiration "for my finest dreams." Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor is essentially a projection of the inquisitor in Don Carlos; and just as the inquisitor's opposite in Carlos is the spontaneous brotherhood of Posa and Don Carlos, so the brothers Karamazov as a whole provide the alternative to the closed world of Dostoevsky's Inquisitor. The Karamazov alternative to both Hamlet and the Grand Inquisitor unfolds in terms of an aesthetic theory which Schiller propounded as his alternative to the arid rationalism of the French Revolution but which he himself was never able to incorporate fully into any of his own dramas.

In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind of 1794-5 Schiller contended that both the rational and sensual faculties were necessary attributes of the fully developed man; but that they were incomplete and even conflicting forms of good. In seeking to harmonize them one cannot use any abstract philosophic formulas which would automatically lead to a one-sided dominance by rationalism. One must rather undergo an

aesthetic education (Erziehung) through developing the instinct for play (Spieltrieb). Children, who make up their rules of play as they go along and spontaneously reconcile their conflicts without formal regulations and imposed rules, provide the key to harmony for the perplexed adult world. Man was born not to repress but to fulfill his sensual self through play which is the fruit of love, "the ladder on which man climbs to the likeness of

God."30

Dmitry's love of life and his exuberant spontaneity (as well as his numerous citations from Schiller) all suggest that he is a kind of incarnation of this spirit of play. He startles people with sudden outbursts of laughter. The play instinct gives him a special attraction to beauty, which is "not just a terrible, but a mysterious thing. There God and the devil strive for mastery, and the battleground is the heart of men."

The battleground is also inside the Karamazovs; and the passionate Dmitry alone transcends and thus resolves the dialectic between the feeling faith of Alyosha and the rational brilliance of Ivan, between one brother visited by God and another visited by the devil. Dmitry teaches the Karamazovs to "love life more than the meaning of life." Love of life is part of the love of all created things. Man was for Schiller the supreme participant in an endless festival of creation; and Dostoevsky seems to be beckoning us to join it. The sin of social Utopias is that they cut off the spontaneity of this creative process; they "deny not God, but the meaning of his creation." Dostoevsky seems to be saying that even if man cannot believe in God he must love and rejoice in the created universe. Man must enjoy "the game for the sake of the game," as Dostoevsky explained his own passionate love of gambling. As distinct from the ordered and rational habits of ants,

man is a frivolous, improbable creature, and like a chess player, loves only the process of attaining goals, not the goal itself.

In defiance of Bazarov's contention that "two times two is four and the rest is nonsense," Dostoevsky's man from the underground even suggests that "the formula two times two is five is not without its attractions."31