The Icon and the Axe

Dmitry is resigned to his fate not by any exercise of logic but by a dream of a cold and hungry baby and a sudden, supra-rational desire "to do something for them all, so that the babe shall weep no more." Dostoevsky heavily underlined these lines in the original sketch for this chapter. Dmitry's "something" is to accept imprisonment and even blame. Though he did not commit the crime, he recognizes that "we are all responsible for all" and gladly goes with the convicts-and with God:

If they drive God from the earth, then we shall shelter him underneath the earth! . . . singing from the bowels of the earth our tragic hymn to God, in whom there is joy! All hail to God and his joy!

Dmitry's own "Ode to Joy" reaches a feverish, Schilleresque climax in his cry:

. . . There is so much of strength in me that I shall overcome all things, all sufferings, just in order to say with every breath: I am! In a thousand agonies-I am! I writhe on the rack-but am! I sit in prison, but still I exist; I see the sun, and-even when I don't-I know that it is. And to know that the sun is-is already the whole of life.

After the trial Dmitry's joy is dampened with illness and second thoughts; but he is cured and his faith in life restored through the sudden irrational desire of the once-proud Katya to accompany him in suffering and exile. "For a Moment the Lie Becomes Truth" is the title of this section. Two times two has, for a moment, become five, for the underground man has suddenly discovered the sun and decided to reach for it with an act of implausible moral heroism. Katya helps win Dmitry-and through him the Karamazovs-back to life.

". . . Now let what might have been come true for one minute. . . . You loved another woman, and I love another man, and yet I shall love you forever, and you will love me; do you know? Do you hear? . . ."

"I shall love you, . . . Katya," Mitya began, drawing a deep breath at each word, ". . . All my life! So it will be, so it will be forever. . . ."

But how does this Schilleresque play of instinct and pantheistic love of life acquire any specific link with Christianity? Perhaps in substituting Christ for Posa and Carlos as the ideological adversary of the Grand Inquisitor Dostoevsky is saying that Christ alone can fulfill their romantic longing for some new brotherhood of freedom and nobility. Yet there is no conversion of Dmitry; and in the Schilleresque moment of irrational truth between Katya and Dmitry, Alyosha, the man of faith, "stood speechless and confounded; he had never expected what he was seeing." Alyosha's teacher, and the major Christ figure in the novel, the monk Zosima, had already bowed down before Dmitry as if to say that God himself has need of such men.

Zosima does, of course, bear a Christian message. He is a composite of the most holy traditions of Russian monasticism: he bears the name of the co-founder of Solovetsk and the attributes both of Tikhon Zadonsky and Father Ambrose of Optyna Pustyn. But he does not bring salvation in the conventional monastic way. Old Karamazov says that Zosima is in reality a

sensualist; and the lecherous old man is proven partly right by the smell of corruption that emanated from Zosima's body after death and destroyed his claim to sainthood. The one key conversion that Zosima effects, that of Alyosha, takes place after the latter, too, has experienced his "breath of corruption" by visiting Grushenka ("the juicy pear"). His conversion over the putrefying body of Zosima is completely devoid of the miracle and authority which the Inquisitor glorified. Like the murder, which it parallels, Alyosha's conversion occurs at night in a manner that is not clinically disclosed. It takes place amidst tears and under an open sky and leads immediately not to a state of beatified withdrawal but to f ailing on the ground and embracing the earth and then to Alyosha's decision to leave the monastery and go out into the world.

We do not know what the future of Alyosha-let alone Dmitry and Ivan-might have been, for in The Brothers we have only the first part of a projected longer work of which he was to be the ultimate hero. The name is again significant, for it is the diminutive of Alexis, calling to mind the idealized figure of Alexis Mikhailovich and the popular folk hero, Alexis the man of God. Yet The Brothers stands complete in itself; and within it there comes at the end a beautiful subplot which ties together dramatically and ideologically the Schilleresque themes and Christian elements in Dostoev-

sky's cosmology.