The Icon and the Axe

The story of "the boys" gives us our only image of Alyosha in action after his conversion. For the most part it is pure Schiller. The setting is boys at play, free of all restraining influences, rejoicing in their spontaneity of expression, their sense of daring, their playful rejection of all that impedes the game of life. Then, into this scene comes something that Schiller and the romantics had viewed as foreign to "the aesthetic education of man": uncaused and irreversible suffering. The very exuberance of children makes their capacity to wound one another's spirit terrifyingly great; and the slow death of the frail little boy Iliusha is clearly related to the mockery of his

playmates.

The seemingly disconnected story is related to the novel as a whole in a number of important ways. The principal ringleader of the gang, Kolya Krasotkin, is an echo of Ivan: a detached intellectual who attempts to repress emotion and dreams up the crime which others act upon. Just as Ivan's hypothesis that "all things are permissible" provides the basis for a patricide which others commit and are punished for, so Kolya rigs up the trap which causes a peasant inadvertently to kill a goose and be punished for it. Dostoevsky tells us that there was no trace of corruption about little Iliusha's body (in contrast to that of Zosima) after death. In his death Iliusha atones, as it were, for the crime of the Karamazovs by embracing his own

father and nobly defending him from the taunts of the doctor, who mocks his poverty. Even more important, over his grave Kolya and the other boys suddenly feel reconciled to the world and to one another. Alyosha, who has been with them as friend and observer, is able to build on this moment of friendship and harmony; and we suddenly find him solving with Kolya the problem he was never able to solve with Ivan:

"We shall remember his face and his clothes and his poor little boots, and his coffin and his unhappy sinful father, and how boldly he stood up for him alone against the whole class."

"We will, we will remember," cried the boys. "He was brave, he was good!"

"Ah, how I loved him!" exclaimed Kolya.

"Ah, children, ah, dear friends, don't be afraid of life! . . ."

Love and bravery, the qualities of adventure, are more important than morality, let alone logic, in the festival of life. The boys suddenly find themselves with a new faith in life, a life that must go on for Iliusha's sake.

"Hurrah for Karamazov," Kolya shouted ecstatically. "And may the dead boy's memory live for ever!" Alyosha added again with feeling.

Their last gathering by Iliusha's little stone recalls the Biblical parable about the stone that was rejected becoming the cornerstone of the new building and also the incident where Iliusha was stoned and humiliated. The scene seems to illustrate "the central message that Ivan and all other proud men of intellect have yet to digest: that "except ye . . . become as little children ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." The "Hamlet question" about the meaning of life is not answered but transcended by a naive and animated leap of faith.

"Karamazov," cried Kolya, "is it really true what religion says that we shall all rise from the dead and live and see one another again, all of us and little Iliusha too?"

"Surely we shall rise, surely we shall see and gaily, gladly tell one another about everything that has happened," Alyosha answered, half laughing, half in enthusiasm.

The meaning of this reconciliation over the dead body of Iliusha is that of the passage from St. John which Dostoevsky placed at the beginning of The Brothers: "Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." New life comes out of death: old Karamazov's, Zosima's, and above all that of the innocent

little boy. The one essential miracle is that of resurrection: the recurring wonder of nature and the central miracle of Orthodox Christianity. One rediscovers God not by studying dogma but by believing in His creation. Christ's first miracle-turning water into wine at the marriage festival in Cana of Galilee-is the biblical text which leads to Alyosha's conversion; and his first impulse is to embrace the earth. Christianity is the religion not of the ascetics and puritans but of the "dark" Karamazovs who rejoice in God's creation and seek to enjoy it. It is the fulfillment of the law and the prophets, not of the Old Testament, but of the romantic apostles of creative freedom; a religion of adventure. Its only dogma is that freely given love in the imitation of Christ will ultimately triumph over everything, for in the words of a Kempis "love pleads no excuse of impossibility."82