The Icon and the Axe

In his final Christian affirmation as in his focus on man's inner nature Dostoevsky was not typical of his age. The trend had been to move away from religion, whether toward the nihilism of the Stavrogins or toward the preoccupied agnosticism of the modern world. One then found a kind of consolation in quasi-religious social ideology, whether of a radical populist or a reactionary Pan-Slav nature. Dostoevsky was too deeply affected by these trends to attempt with any confidence a full reaffirmation of traditional Christianity. His faith is rather that of a realist in search of "the more real." There are, perhaps, two icons for this deeply personal and precarious faith. The first is the image of the Sistine Madonna, which he always kept over his writing desk as if in defiance of Bakunin and the revolutionaries who would have thrown it on the barricades at Dresden. (Dostoevsky himself caused a minor uproar in Dresden when he defied the guards in the museum to climb onto a chair for a closer look at the painting.)33 The Madonna depicted the source of all creation, the supreme mother, with the consummate technique of European art in which his own novels are steeped. This painting was a reminder of the "marvelous dead" that lay buried in the "strife and logic" of post-Christian Europe and which he hoped to resurrect through the rejuvenated Christian commitment of the Russian people and the prophetic power of his own art.

The second icon of Dostoevsky's anguished faith is a picture of hands. The Brothers is filled with hands and feet. They are the implements for doing things in this world, symbols of the "harsh and terrible thing" of love in action as opposed to love in dreams. "What have I come for?" asks Katya rhetorically in the last scene with Dmitry, "to embrace your feet, to press your hands like this, till it hurts." Hands have been a symbol of laceration throughout the novel. In the fable of the onion we are told of a peasant woman who lost her last chance for salvation from the fiery lake of hell by trying to beat off the hands of others who sought to grasp the onion

which the peasant woman once gave in charity and which God in his compassion had extended to her. The hands of innocent children beckon Ivan to rebellion against God, He tells Alyosha about the murderer who held out a pistol to a baby and waited to blow its brains out until the precise moment that the baby extended its little, trusting hand to touch it. Then he is driven to insanity by the image of a five-year-old girl tortured by her parents and left in an outhouse with her face smeared in excrement by a sadistic mother who sleeps calmly in the warm house while the little girl prays without any resentment to "dear kind God" and "beats her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and cold." Ivan rebels against God because of the need to avenge the tears of the little girl; and even Alyosha admits that he would be unwilling to accept any ideal harmony that tolerated the sight of "that baby beating its breast with its fist." Yet Dmitry is led to accept his fate by the dream in which "a little babe cried and cried, and held out its little fists blue from cold."

The final message of redemption occurs at the end of the story of "the boys," which is also the end of the novel. Just before, we are given a last pathetic image of the suffering of Iliusha's bereaved father. Last seen sobbing incoherently by his dying son "with his fists pressed against his head," he returns to dominate the early part of the funeral scene. He is all hands: grasping at the flowers from the bier, embracing the coffin, crumbling the bread and throwing it in the grave. In a masterly inversion of the scene in which Dmitry is forced to take off his boots and expose his ugly feet in court, Dostoevsky leaves Iliusha's father kissing the boots of his buried boy and asking, "Iliusha, dear little man, where are thy little feet?"