Nearly ten years' study and thought
went to the making of . The book has
been called " an encyclopaedia of
Russian life," rather, I suppose, to
convey its comprehensiveness than to define its
char- acter ; for the name is a
foolish one. Dosto- evsky could not write
an encyclopaedia ; he could not represent
life, and it is certain that, considered
as a picture of Russian life, The
Brothers Karamazov is fundamentally false. In
this work, above all others, Dostoevsky
deliberately annihilated all sense of time.
The events of the one day which
occupies one half the book resist all
efforts at enclosure within our human
computation, and there can be no doubt
in the mind prepared to accept Dosto- evsky
for what he is, that whether his
intention be conscious or unconscious he
bears us away at the very opening of
the story into the time- less world of
spirit.
There are events,
enthralling happenings, 203
through whose material agency the drama of
the spirit is unfolded, for the
agonists are potencies of the human soul.
Nor are they merely potencies ; that
which is possible for the human spirit
is its ultimate reality. But to bring
these possibilities together into one time,
one space, one family, is to load
the lesser reality in which we live
beyond its endurance. Yet this is what
Dostoevsky did in The Brothers Karamazov.
Two women and five men are the
persons of the drama : the father,
Fyodor, the three legitimate sons, Dmitri,
Ivan, and Al- yosha, his natural son,
Smerdyakov, and Gru- shenka and Katerina
Ivanovna. Of these the women play their
part wholly in the material or earthly
history. They are necessary to the events
which happen in time, and in some
sort the medium by whose aid the
spirits of the men are made incarnate.
On Fyodor's struggle with Dmitri for the
possession of Grushenka the narrative is built
; but this awful contest is in its
deep intention not for the prize of
Grushenka's body, but rooted in the natural
hostility of the father and the son.
It is not an accident of their
desiring the same bodily beauty which sets
them in opposition ; they are enemies
one to the other, since time began.
Likewise it is with Dmitri and Ivan
and Katerina Ivanovna. Ivan hates
Dmitri, not
204
because he is preferred in Katerina
Ivanovna's love, but because it is in
his destiny to hate his brother. We
are aware of these things, even though
we do not know them, when we first
read the book in which they are
written. The violence and terror of the
passions which are unloosed in these men
is beyond their earthly object. We can
devise a hundred ways for averting the
actual horror of that murder ; but
intuitively we know that the father must
be slain. His death is not ordained
by any in- dividual will, but by the
spirit of man. He belongs to the
darkness which is past, like an obscene
beast evoked out of another time. Man
has passed beyond him, and if he
bursts out of the oblivion which is
his rightful prison, then he must die.
Yet wherein is his offence ? He
is a sen- sualist ; but his sons are
sensualists. We do not hate Ivan and
Dmitri. They are with us ; they
loathe and hate their father, yet they
are of his blood, and his spirit
is them. They know they are like him,
and it is for that they hate and
fear him. As the father is to
us, so is he to them ; he is
their very substance, that in them which
being tamed is their being, and being
unconquered, their death. They have put
their father away from them, yet are
they haunted by the fear that they
may be like
205
him ; they long to deny him as
their begetter, yet they know that they
are part of him. He is their past,
his spirit has been in them fashioned
anew. There is a profound difference
between him and them, yet, when they
look upon him, they are afraid that
the difference may be as nothing, and
the identity every- thing ; and they are
terrified by their own tormenting conviction
that the new form of the old being
may be no more than a flimsy veneer.
Perhaps the veneer is flimsy enough. All
that divides them from him is their
conscious- ness. He is the beast, yet he
does not know himself for the beast ;
if he had this know- ledge he would
be other than he is, and his great
strength would be weakened. It seems that
he has no other conception of his
own foulness than that which comes to
him from the loath- ing and disgust in the
faces of those with whom he speaks.
When he tells to Ivan and Alyosha the
revolting story of his devilish cruelty to
their mother he is absolutely insensible
to its effect upon them ; he is
amazed that Alyosha should burst into a
paroxysm of sudden, violent, silent weeping,
while, so far from an- ticipating Ivan's
anger and contempt, he has utterly
forgotten that Alyosha's mother was Ivan's
mother also. He is cunning
and cruel
206
and foul, but he is also less
than human. He seems to work his
wickedness not deliberately, and in some
sense not to be accountable for his
foulness, as though Dostoevsky the sorcerer,
like Prospero in the magic isle, had
endued this Caliban with words which had
for him no inward meaning :
Abhorred slave, Which any print of goodness
will not take, Being capable of all
ill. I pitied thee, Took pains
to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other : when thou
didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning,
but wouldst gabble like A thing most
brutish, I endowed thy purposes With words
that made them known : but
thy vile
race, Though thou didst learn, had that
in't which good
natures Could not abide to be with. .
. .
Not good natures only, but human nature
itself, which has in the ages become
conscious, cannot abide to be with Fyodor
Pavlovitch. Words do not belong to him
by right, but by some black art he
has been clothed with the prerogatives of
humanity, and from beneath their disguise
there shows something which rouses a
shudder of physical repulsion in his sons,
who know themselves to be insecurely set
at one precarious remove from his con-
dition. " Perhaps I
shan't kill him," says
207
Dmitri, " and perhaps I shall.
I'm afraid that he will suddenly become
so loathsome to me with his face at
that moment. I hate his ugly throat,
his nose, his eyes, his shameless snigger.
I feel a physical repulsion. That's
what I'm afraid of. That's what may
be too much for me." And Ivan
has but one word for him : the
pig. With a cunning irony the old man
indulges the thought and retorts upon
them : " Ah, you boys ! You
children, little sucking pigs. . . ."
Of the little sucking pigs, jlvan and
Dmitri stand together. The father knows
that these are his enemies, and though
he fears the bodily violence of Dmitri
in his anger, he is still more afraid
of Ivan ; for Ivan is clairvoyant,
and he from deliberate reasoning may do
that to which Dmitri can be impelled
only by a sudden access of consuming
anger. The hatred and contempt of Ivan for
his father is fixed and irrevocable,
because it is in essence an in- tellectual
passion. " Fyodor Pavlovitch, our papa,
was a pig," says Ivan to Dmitri
when he is in prison, " but his
ideas were right enough " ; and
it is precisely because his ideas are
right enough, and the final issue of
all Ivan's impassioned dialectic is embodied
in this pig, that Ivan detests him.
Fyodor Pavlovitch is the swine of the
Temptation of St. Antony,
208
jeer of eternity at the human spirit
which con- sumes itself in the fires of
its passion for know- ledge, and in him
Ivan has always before him the vision
of the man which was, by the mere
fact of his being, paralysing the man
which is by the revelation of his
ultimate impotence. His father is that
which his mind tells him he must be,
and yet he cannot be : and Ivan hates
him steadfastly for his power. Fyodor
Pavlovitch is something ; Ivan is
nothing afc-^ l^all. He is tempest-tossed
between his two desires, to love life
and to know the meaning of it, and
his soul is ill-compact of instincts which
he cannot justify and seekings which end
in nothingness, while beneath the impotent
frenzy of his tormented brain slumbers the
conviction that all his doubts and demands
may be illusion and vanity, and no
more than the thin garment which covers
for a little while within him the
dark beast of the father's sou- He is
nearer to his father than is Dmitri,
for all the wide space that separates
them to the eye. He is complex, while
Dmitri is simple. He can approve his
father, which Dmitri could never do ;
and he feels the presence of his
father's soul within him. The instinctive
and overwhelming physical repulsion which sweeps
over Dmitri when he stands before Fyodor
Pavlovitch, is denied to Ivan, whose o 209
an ile ife-J
mind but not his being abhors his
father, for in him he recognises a
power which is its own justification, and
a kinship which goes deeper than conscious
denial. Ivan knows that the N spirit
of the father is the thirst for
life. " We shall meet before I
am thirty," he says to Alyosha, "
when I shall begin to want to turn
aside from the cup. Father doesn't want
to turn aside from his cup till he
is seventy, he dreams of hanging on to
eighty, so he says. He means it only
too seriously, though he is a buffoon.
He stands upon a firm rock, too, he
stands upon his sensuality — though after we
are thirty indeed there may be
nothing else to stand on. . . . But
to hang on to seventy is nasty,
better only to thirty ; one might
retain ' a shadow of nobility ' by
deceiving one's self. ..." In such a
moment Ivan is forced to confess that
the difference between them is precariously
based in the son's desire to retain
" a shadow of nobility," some
reflection of the youthful days in which
the thirst for life had not been
narrowed, by the eventual barrenness of all
loftier search, to the perpetual quest
for sensual gratification. If that is all
that remains of the high hopes and
the strength of youth thirsting for life,
loving the meaning of life no less
than life itself (of which the aspirations
of conscious- ness are not the least part),
then to hang on to
210
seventy is nasty. But this, Ivan
knows, is a declaration made in the
heady nobility of youth ; there may
at thirty indeed be nothing else to
stand on. . . .
Beside the intellectual complexity of Ivan,
which for all his youth soars at
times to cold and dizzy heights of
speculation, Dmitri's sim- plicity is transparent.
On the night when he has taken the
fatal decision and torn the little bag
from his neck, while he is driving
furiously to Mokroe and Grushenka, Andrey
the coach- man turns round to him and
says : " But you're like a
little child — that's how we look on
you." And he has the naivete of
a child. He sins in simpleness of
heart, conscious and repentant of his own
waywardness. He is violent, passionate and
dissipated ; and withal generous and
honest. Though he says that he has
thought much about passion, his thinking is
not so much the work of the
mind as of in- stinct. By instinct he
seeks for some repose either in the
passion of love or in a simple faith.
' The awful thing," he says to
Alyosha, " is that beauty is
mysterious. God and the devil are fighting
there, and the battlefield is the heart
of man." His contrary instincts he can
neither question nor justify : intuition,
not intellect, guides him, so that he
can accept with a childish
faith the arguments of
Ivan for
211
gospel, and revere their author for
an oracle ; yet he will never act
by the argument he has adopted. Even
a shallow cunning fool like Rakitin, the
monk who turns journalist, has logic enough
to deceive Dmitri's brain. But in spite
of all intellectual deceptions he holds
fast by his own nature ; he does
nothing deliberately, but all things by
impulse, yet he does not wholly trust
his impulse or his intui- tion, for, being
conscious of the war within his own
heart, he is ready to abase himself
before the imaginary perfections of others.
He knows that Katerina Ivanovna does not
love him, as well as Ivan knows it,
and even though he can- not explain it
so clearly as his brother he knows
that she is a monster of pride,
in love with her own virtue, pursuing
him with her magnan- imity, although she
has hated him ever since their first
meeting for the blow he dealt her self-esteem
; and yet, in spite of his inward
conviction, he is prepared to assure
himself that she is a perfect being,
and he himself in her re- gard a
devil of baseness and ingratitude. Even
when he has finally broken with her,
and written the incriminating letter which
she uses to ruin him : " He
murdered his father and ruined himself to
hold his ground rather than endure your
pride . . . And he doesn't love
you : Your slave and enemy," she
is still upon his
212
conscience. In prison the thought of
her tor- tures him, and he is profoundly
miserable until he shall receive her
forgiveness, which she re- fuses him. He
is, in truth, the simple-hearted Mitka, who
towards others is always an idealist and
towards himself a merciless and unfair judge.
For Dmitri too is a seeker. Though
he is a physical and ungovernable man,
he has the vision of some harmony and
beauty which he may attain through the
body. He cannot deny the body, neither
can he find rest in it, and he
gropes blindly after the secret and
mystery of *epose. As Ivan is a
mind, through which he
3els the insurgent body will rise and
overthrow .he stronghold of his consciousness,
so Dmitri
s a body amongst whose tumultuous and
ab- sorbing life mind like an insidious ferment
works its way. " You see,"
he says to Alyosha in prison, "
I never had any of these doubts
before, but it was hidden away in
me. It was perhaps just because ideas
I did not understand were surging up
in me that I used to drink and
fight and rage. It was to stifle
them in myself, to still them, to
smother them." And the new doubt that
has climbed its painful way through the
recesses of his being into the mind's
day- light is that incessant question :
" What if He doesn't exist ?
" What if everything should
213
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
be lawful, and the harmony in which
he had in spite of all placed an
instinctive and unreason- ing trust be only
an empty dream ? Dmitri is sorry to
lose God, for God was a means of
repose, and without Him he has only
the con- sciousness that he must find rest
and the know- ledge that the way to
it is hidden from him, [So Dmitri,
the body, turned to Ivan, the mind^
^seeking for guidance, and desiring to
drink from, the springs of his soul :
and Ivan was silent a s the tomb.
Once only did Ivan vouchsafe hir jj a
word, which was terrible : "
Fyodor Pavlc,- vitch, our papa, was a pig
; but his ideas were right enough."
To Dmitri that was worse than Rakitin.
It was better to have a bare
denial jf all harmony and purpose than
that his father should be approved. If
there was nothing, it were better to know
and face the desolation than to believe
that the swinishness of the olcl man
was right, for this at least Dmitri
could not but abhor. He was a
sensualist, too, but he knew himself for
what he was, and he sought for that
which must lie beyond it. " I go
on and I don't know whether I'm
going to shame or to light and
joy." But the hope of the light
and the joy sustained him ; he strove
for a consummation that should be
worthy of his humanity. The darkness of
the beast was put behind him ;
he was at least a man.
214
h
And Dmitri's love for Grushenka, upon which
the real or earthly story turns, is
the passionate love of a man for a
woman. He may J talk about the
Karamazov "bug" which creeps about
within him and spreads the plague of
baseness in his soul, but it is
only the language of self-abasement. His
passion for Grushenka is the desire of
one fierce and simple heart for another.
She, like him, deceives her- self with the
imaginary perfections of others. Love is
the whole of life to her ; and
for love she will sacrifice everything, and
even disregard the promptings of her intuition
in the ardour of her desire to
believe in it. She can crush the
certainty of her conviction of his
worthlessness in order to believe in the
Polish lover who deserted her ; and
for five years she can remain faithful
to the man of her imagination, because,
having given him all, she cannot but
believe that he is in return wholly
hers. If she were to lose her faith
in the all-sufficiency of love, nothing
would be left her. She is jealous and
strong and true ; she can deceive
herself for the sake of her faith in
love, but another's pre- tence of love cannot
deceive her. Her intui- tion sees clearly
into the nature of Katerina Ivanovna, when
she will not kiss her hand, and she
strikes back ruthlessly, because she cannot
4 be won over with chocolate,"
and resents the
215
1
I
FYODORDOSTOEVSKY
blind contempt and pride of Katerina's ap-
proach to her. Even then she loves Dmitri's
noble heart, and were there not an
older loyalty to contend with her new
love, she would have been wholly his,
for their simple, jealous, fierce natures
are destined for each other. But she
cannot root her first love out of
her heart, and when the message comes
for her to go to Mokroe, her loyalty
and faith in love magni- ficently triumphs
over her contempt for her own much
endurance.
" He has sent for me," she
cried, her face white and distorted with
a wan smile : " he whistles
! Crawl back, little dog ! "
But only for one instant she stood
as though hesi- tating ; suddenly the blood
rushed to her head and sent a glow
to her cheeks !
" I will go," she cried ;
" five years of my life !
Good-bye ! Good-bye, Alyosha, my fate
is sealed. Go, go, leave me, all of
you, don't let me see you again.
Grushenka is flying to a new life.
. . . Don't you remember evil against
me either, Rakitin. I may be going to
my death ! Ugh ! I feel as
though I were drunk ! "
Grushenka, too, is stayed by the hope
of the new life which will be found
in love. The love of which she dreams
is beyond the body yet through the body.
Nevertheless, though in her and in Dmitri's
216
infatuation for her Dostoevsky reached the
most perfect expression of passionate love
that is to be found in all his
work, Grushenka has no part in the
timeless drama which is the inner reality
of . She is in its comparison no
more than a twig borne along by the
rushing torrent of the Karamazov spirit.
Katerina Ivanovna, Father Zossima himself are
no more than this. The father and the
sons are set apart from the world,
and they are conscious of their separation.
Each one of them recognises at some
period of the story that a power
works in him, which is of another
kind than human impulse. Alyosha asks him-
self : Does the spirit of God move
over that spirit ? and he must
confess that he does not know. It is
too big to be thus limited, for with-
in itself it contains both good and
evil. The Karamazov spirit is older than
good and evil themselves.
What then is this mighty spirit that
is mani- fested in Fyodor and Dmitri and
Ivan and Alyosha ? Heredity explains
nothing, for it tells us nothing of
what the heirs inherit. And this thing
is not sensualism. Neither Ivan nor Alyosha
are within any human meaning of the
word sensualists. Sensualism is but one
single form of a mightier power. Nor
is it a passionate thirst for
life. All men have this
in their
217
degree, and it is not enough to
say that the Karamazovs have merely a
greater thirst for life than their fellows.
They are divided abso- lutely from mankind.
In so far as they are like men,
the spirit which moves them must be
described in human and relative terms. But
they too are spirits ; they are
not men with a passionate thirst for
life, they are Life itself, and in
the generations of the Karamazov family not
human lives but epochs of the human
con- sciousness are born and die.
In this book Dostoevsky gathered together
ill the thought, the rioiihtr and the
fai^ of a lifetimeT into one, timelest1
ni1BTTny nf life itRfllfr To see less
than this in is
to be condemned to see nothing but
a chaos illumined by fitful flashes of
genius. There is no chaos in Dostoevsky's
work. Its strange- ness is due to the
immensity of its form. And if the
categorical statement that the Karama^ zov family
represents life itself seen by the, pyr
of genius sub specie aeternitatis is
too abrupt, in spite of the endeavour
that has been made to show the
process of his vision to this necessary
and final culmination, then we have only
to follow out the clue that is
afforded by the recurrence in of figures
whose significance has already been established.
Ivan Karamazov belongs to the order of 218
THE BROTHERS KARA M AZOV
Stavrogin and Svidrigailov ; but in
him the conception has been made yet
more abstract. He is, as it were, the
mind of Stavrogin apart from the body.
He has no past of attempted action
behind him ; he is only a
consciousness which has brooded over the
destiny of mankind. In him the seeking
mind is borne onwards to what seems
like a delirium of abstract specula- tion.
The profound thought which underlies "
The Grand Inquisitor " is simplicity
itself compared with the torments which he
suffers from his own mind in the
Dream. Nothing has ever been written like
that Dream ; it is satu- rated with
the metaphysical terror and ob- scenity which
is the appointed end of the striving
of the human consciousness. In Ivan the
road of this perilous progress is made clearer
than in any other of Dostoevsky's
characters. In the tavern he reveals
himself to Alyosha : —
. . . And so I accept God and
am glad to, and what's more I accept
His wisdom, His purpose — which are utterly
beyond our ken ; I believe in
the underlying order and the meaning of
life ; I believe in the eternal
harmony in which they say we shall
one day be blended. I believe in the
Word to which the universe is striving,
and Which Itself was " with
God," and Which Itself is God, and
so on, and so on, to infinity. There
are all sorts of phrases for
it. I seem to be on
219
the right path, don't I ? Yet
would you believe it, in the final
result I don't accept this world of
God's, and although I know it exists
I don't accept it at all. It's not
that I don't accept God, you must
under- stand, it's the wnr|fl pppfl 4-^*1 Ky
tt;™ t ^^1 gnrj ctP- npt accept." Tet
me make it plain. I believe like a
cnnatnat suffering will be healed and made
up for, that all the humiliating absurdity
of human contradic- tions will vanish like
a pitiful mirage, like the despic- able
fabrication of the impotent and infinitely
small Euclidean mind of man, that in
the world's finale, at the moment of
eternal harmony, something so precious will
come to pass that it will suffice
for all hearts, for the comforting of
all resentments, for the atonement of all
the crimes of humanity, of all the
blood they've shed ; that it will
make it not only possible to forgive
but to justify all that has happened
with men — but though all that may
come to pass, I don't accept
it. I won't accept it. .
. .
And when he has explained why he
will not accept harmony at the p™yfj
rf suffering mil pain, he continues ; —
I don't want harmony. From love to
humanity I don't want it. I would
rather be left with the un- avenged
suffering. I would rather remain with my
unavenged suffering and my unsatisfied
indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides,
too high a price is asked for harmony
; it's beyond our means to pay so
much to enter on it. And so I
hasten to give back my entrance ticket,
and if I am an honest man I am
bound to give it back as soon
as possible. And that I am doing.
It's not God that I don't accept,
Alyosha, only I most respectfully return
Him the ticket. . . .
220
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
" One can hardly live in
rebellion, and I want to live." It
is hardly possible to hand back the
ticket, by no means so simple a
matter, any- how, as putting a bullet
through one's brain. An Ivan knows that
the act of self-destruction is like
spinning a coin : heads, more of this
mockery called life ; tails, real
death. Poor devils ! if it were a
real coin with heads on one side and
tails on the other, perhaps they would
be happier. A good, sound, even
chance of final annihilation might comfort
them. But these vague whispers of eternal
harmony, these misty surmises of some
ineffable beatitude wherein they might see
that all is good and the voice of
approbation be compelled from them, these
it is which fill them with cold
desolation. To praise the creator of this
world — if the chance were but one in
a million of such a con- summation, how
bitter is the poison on their lips !
And in the " Dream " the
salto mortale has been taken. Ivan stands
on the thither side of mortality. He
has spun the coin ; and he has
lost the toss. " All that you
have, we have," says the Devil, "
even old ladies of eighteen stone and
the stings of conscience for punish- ment."
The desolate vista of aeon on aeon,
eternity opening out on to yet
another eternity, is revealed, but not the
secret. " They won't
221
tell me the secret, because I might
bawl Hos- anna and the indispensable minus
would dis- appear." This devil in the
seedy frock-coat and the out-of-date eyeglass
would indisputably bawl, for he is the
symbol of a possibility, and in the
clear, cold air of the rebellious
mind, the possible is the truly real.
It would be some- thing, would it not,
if these tortured rebel souls could know
that evil was a mighty power, magnificent
in its strength and noble in its
deliberate blackness, which they might serve
or fight and be in either unashamed.
It would be something to have finally
laid the ghost of harmony. But the
odds are that it does exist, and then
what if evil should be something sordid and
vulgar, some seedy down at heels purpose,
pitched by the unknown into a me- chanical
occupation, a short-sighted clerk doing his
duty every day over the ledger
without ever a spark of knowledge of
the end that his activity served ?
There is not much room for roman- ticism
when you have grown used to the idea
of eternity. " How can such a
vulgar devil visit such a great man
as you ? "
It is a bitter thought, but not
so bitter as that other doubt, that
this devil has nothing new, that he
is no more than the vulgar and stupid
part of Ivan. If he were only
vulgar and stupid in his own right,
if he only corporeally and in-
222
THE BROTHERS K A R A M A Z O V
disputably was, then in that knowledge Ivan
might find rest. Let him be vulgar,
be stupid, be low, even let him carry
a tail like a great Dane, only let
him be. Let him be anything rather
than the imagination of Ivan's own brain.
This modern Hamlet craves for a being,
not for principalities and powers any
more — those dreams have gone the way
of the old heroisms — but just for a
being. It would be even comfortable to
have a being who shared his thoughts,
a being with the same doubts and the
same horror (even though being seedy and
bourgeois he should choose the high-sounding
name of '* aesthetic " for his
repulsion) of being compelled to shout
Hosanna ! But in that realm of
indeterminate equations there is hardly a
chance of falling among friends, even if
the friend should prove only to be
a poor relation. Svidrigailov's conjecture is
a likelier one.
Ivan has gone far on the way of
conscious- ness, farther perhaps than any before
him, and he stands fainting at the
end of the cul-de-sac. He has thought
of the man-God ; but his mind will
not suffer so gross a deception.
Before the mind of the man-God will
remain the same vast unknown. When all
human science has been taken to the
farthest edge of the knowable, nothing has
been accomplished for the soul
223
which craves for being. These minds
are not deceived ; when all their
feverish dreams of being beyond their own
have fled away, and they are alone,
then comes another question, whether they
themselves are. Being pitifully honest minds
they answer that they have no assurance
of anything save their own will to
be, for even they are not. The cogito
ergo sum is not sufficient any more.
Their dialectic goes deeper than that of
the good Monsieur Des- cartes. Their volo
esse quia cogito is a slenderer foundation
on which to build, when they have
learnt that beneath that consciousness and
that conscious will lie things that will
not ever come under its domination, things
in comparison with which the daylight of
the knowing, willing mind itself may be
no more than a dream. It is indeed
always worth while to talk to a
clever man, and when Smerdyakov tells Ivan
that he has his father's soul, Ivan
must admit that he has not wasted his
time.
" You are like Fyodor Pavlovitch,
you are more like him than any of
his children ; you've the same soul
as he had."
" You are not a fool," said
Ivan, seeming struck. The blood rushed to
his face. " You are serious now
! " he observed, looking suddenly
at Smerdyakov with a different expression.
" It was your pride," an- swered
Smerdyakov, " made you think I
was a fool."
224
The human consciousness is proud, and
though man cannot live in rebellion,
yet since rebellion must be, the mind
can only be main- tained by the pride
of its rebellion. But what if it
cannot rebel, and the proud will to
be itself be only a waking dream ?
And even in his waking moments, Ivan
is not spared. The Devil for the time
of dreams, and Smerdyakov for the daylight,
are his familiars. ) The two truths
are living and abroad. Hamlet had pondered
what dreams may come in that sleep of
death ; but Ivan had a double burden,
those old dreams, and these others
that haunt this sleep of life ; and
it was a little harder to tell
Smerdyakov that he was Ivan's dream. He
could not be scared by an inkstand
or a glass. Smerdyakov, who made love
to Marfa, sang in a sweet and sugary
voice sentimental songs to the guitar,
discussed God with poor old Grigory, was
not a ghost to be laid. His hair
oil, his polished glace boots, his French
exercise books and his admirable soups, had
all too deep a savour of the
concrete and the real to be dispelled
by a movement of the brain. Alyosha,
who could not see the Devil, could
see Smerdyakov ; and probably Smerdyakov was
less pleasant of the two to behold.
The Devil, who was clever enough to
throw doubt upon his own reality, had
not enough metaphysics to p 225
discredit Ivan's own. On the contrary,
he pro- fessed a certain envious preference
for the realism of earth " where
all is formulated and geometrical,"
advantages of a condition which Ivan at
least shared. Of course, it may have
been that when he was tired of
being a shabby- genteel Russian gentleman
qui faisait la cin- quantaine, he chose
to incarnate himself in the valet, and
it is, moreover, certain that he made
his one recorded appearance in his proper
person, at the moment that Smerdyakov had
/ given up the ghost. But whether
Smerdyakov were really he or not, is
a question of little moment : they were
all closely related, and in any case
Ivan found Smerdyakov the more tormenting
of the two. For the existence of
Smerdyakov was a direct challenge to Ivan's
own. If he was not the Devil,
at least they both had learned the
precise trick of obtruding upon his
consciousness in the same school.
Sitting down again, Ivan began looking
round as though searching for something.
This happened several times. At last his
eyes were fastened intently upon one point.
Ivan smiled, but an angry flush suffused
his face. He sat a long while
in his place, his head propped on
both arms, though he looked sideways at
the same point, at the sofa which
stood against the opposite wall. There was
evidently some- thing, some object that irritated
him there, worried and tormented him. .
. .
226
That was one of them. Here
is the other.
Ivan tried not to think, but that,
too, was no use. What made his
depression so vexatious and irritating was
that it had a kind of casual,
external character — he felt that. Some
person or thing seemed to be stand- ing
out somewhere, just as something will
sometimes obtrude itself on the eye, and
though one may be so busy that for
a long time one does not notice
it, yet it irritates and almost torments
one, till at last one realises, and
removes the offending object. . . .
It would be hard to distinguish the
one from the other by anything in his
manner of announcing himself, though, as a
matter of history, the former was the
Devil and the latter Smerdyakov. For they
are both " poor rela- tions," with
the same irritating trick of waiting till
they are noticed, the same insistent defer-
ence of holding their peace until they are
spoken to, and beneath it all the
same revolting familiarity. It may be that
Smerdyakov too was a projection of Ivan's
own brain, in spite of the fact that
he was a familiar spectacle in the
town, paid his court to a real
Marfa, made real soups, and murdered a
real man. But of this last we are
not quite sure. Certainly Smerdyakov is as
real as Fyodor Pavlovitch, and as real
as Ivan himself; but so is the Devil.
They are all very real, so very
real that they are in truth a little
too real for what we
227
/
are provisionally agreed to call reality.
That the people of the town saw
Smerdyakov and did not see the Devil
is due perhaps only to the inevitable
awkwardness of representing the timeless world
in time. It may be there really was
no Smerdyakov as there really was no
Devil, and they both had their abode
in Ivan's soul. But then who did the
murder ? Then of course it may have
been Ivan himself, or, on the other
hand, there may have been no murder
at all.
The trouble is that all these
solutions are true. Smerdyakov murdered Fyodor
Pavlo- vitch ; Ivan murdered him ;
and he was not actually murdered at
all. According as one is more or less
initiate into the grim mysteries which
Dostoevsky practised, he can rest in one
or other of these interpretations. There
are such things, the idealist philosophers
tell us, as degrees of reality. The
murder of Fyodor Pavlovitch might serve as
a test case for Mr. F. G. Bradley.
The eighteen-stone trades- men's wives — and they
are the happiest — can have Smerdyakov for
their villain ; the scien- tific psychologists
can have Ivan ; and the others can
find no villain at all, for there was
no murder. Smerdyakov is for those
who will have Dostoevsky an artist, Ivan
for those who will have him a
scientist, while for those who
228
will have him neither of these, but
something so strange and terrible that
there is as yet no word for it,
the thought of a murder will hardly
have meaning. . . .
But to return to Smerdyakov and let
him be for the moment bodily and
actual, sunning himself, even with his hand
upon the shoulder of his guitar. Before
this mean, contemptible creature Ivan's conscious
will is paralysed. Ivan loathes him for
his peculiar and revolting familiarity.
With anger and repulsion he looked at
Smerdy- akov's emasculate sickly face, with
the little curls combed forward on his
forehead. His left eye winked and grinned
as though to say, " Where are
you going ? You won't pass by ; you
see that we two clever people have
something to say to each other."
Ivan shook. " Get away, you
miserable idiot. What have I to do
with you ? " was on the
tip of his tongue, but to his
profound astonishment he heard himself say,
" Is my father still asleep or
has he waked ? "
He asked the question softly and
meekly to his own surprise, and at
once, again to his own surprise, sat
down on the bench. For an instant
he felt almost frightened ; he
remembered it afterwards. . . .
On that memorable day other things hap-
pened which Ivan remembered long afterwards, and
they were all connected with Smerdyakov.
44 Ivan was fretted, too, by all sorts
of strange 229
and almost surprising desires ; for
instance, after midnight he suddenly had an
intense in- clination to go down, open the
door, go to the lodge and beat
Smerdyakov. But if he had been asked
why, he could not have given any
exact reason, except perhaps that he
loathed the valet as one who had
insulted him more gravely than anyone in
the world. On the other hand, he was
more than once that night overcome by
a sort of inexplicable humiliating terror,
which he felt positively paralysed his
physical powers. . . . Remembering
that night long afterwards, Ivan recalled
with peculiar repulsion how he had suddenly
got up from the sofa and stealthily
as though he were afraid of being
watched, had opened the door, gone out
on the staircase and listened to Fyodor
Pavlovitch stirring down below, had listened
a long while — some five minutes — with a
sort of strange curiosity, holding his breath
while his heart throbbed. And why he
had done all this, why he was
listening he could not have said. That
' action ' all his life afterwards he
called 4 infamous,' and at the bottom
of his heart he thought of it as
the basest action of his life. . .
.'"
The sickly, emasculate valet had been the
cause of no small convulsion in
Ivan's soul. Smerdyakov had not only
insulted him more
230
grievously than anybody else in the
world, but after the insult, Ivan had
himself done what he knew in the
bottom of his heart was the basest
action of his life. Plainly there was
contagion in contact with Smerdyakov. Yet
if under Smerdyakov's contagion Ivan had debased
himself to the lowest, how was it
that he could have been insulted by
him ? The valet could not have been
quite so mean and contemptible after all,
for there must have been an unhallowed
strength in his vileness and degradation so
to have convulsed Ivan's soul. It was
as though he had crept into Ivan's
being on a sudden, and made his home
there.
On the plane of the actual there
is but one explanation. Ivan is conniving
with Smer- dyakov so that Dmitri should
murder his father, and will not admit
it to himself, yet is he forced to
admit it. But the self-deception is extreme
and the horror extravagant. One man does
not unconsciously connive with another ; the
activity is one of consciousness. But the
horror of all the meetings between Ivan and
Smerdyakov is not a horror of the
actual world. They are not two conscious,
willing beings in contact with one another.
When Ivan returned from Moscow, we
are told, his hatred for Dmitri grew
stronger every day,
231
and " he realised that it was
not on account of Katya's ' returns ■
that he
hated him,
but just because
he was
the murderer
of his
father." Ivan was a clever man — he had Smerdyakov's word for that —
but even he was not clever enough to
arrive at hating Dmitri for a murder
which he himself had planned. He could
not so greatly have deceived himself as
to whose hands were truly stained with
blood. And Dostoevsky did not underline those
words from contrariety.
Ivan did not know who did the
murder. The conversation with Smerdyakov was
to him no more, and no less, than
the ugly memory of a terrible dream.
It was a dream. When Smer- dyakov at
last told him by whose bodily hands
Fyodor Pavlovitch was slain, Ivan passed
by a convulsion of his whole being
from the waking world into the dream
world again.
" Aren't you tired of it ?
Here we are face to face ; what's
the use of going on and keeping
up a farce to each other ? Are
you still trying to throw it all
on to me, to my face ? You
murdered him ; you are the real
murderer, I was only your instrument,
your faith- ful servant, and it was
following your words I did it."
" Did it ? Why did you
murder him ? " Ivan turned cold.
Something seemed to give way in his
brain, and he shuddered all over with
a cold shiver. . . .
" Do you know, I'm afraid that
you are a dream or a phantom sitting
before me ? " he muttered.
232
" There's no phantom here, but
only us two and one other. No doubt
he is here, that third, between us. .
. ."
At that moment that third is between
them, holding them together. The divided
soul has been made one again. And
Ivan and Smerdy- akov are one person,
in the dream world which is real.
There the slender, flimsy curtain of
consciousness which veils himself from Ivan's eyes
is rent asunder, and he is one
again. His brain stands still with the
horror of this sight. He who was so
noble a rebel cannot rebel now. He
who craved for a being has found
one in himself. Stavrogin crushed his
instincts, he would allow no other Stavrogin
; but how shall this other Ivan be
crushed ? How shall his conscious will
be asserted ; now that he is Ivan
no longer, but another ?
Stavrogin had his " monkey," but
Ivan's familiar is altogether more terrible.
Pyotr Verhovensky was an embodied caricature of
his master's superhuman purposes. But be- tween
Ivan and Smerdyakov there is no such
relation : they are other, absolutely
other, yet they are one. Being lies
deeper than con- sciousness, and the self
has its tap-roots spread far below in
the dark obscenity of things, where the
light of consciousness cannot penetrate, and
of this strange and awful thing it
cannot
233
even be said that it is or that
it lives. There are no categories for
its being, and none can be invented
by the knowing mind which is but a
tiny part of it. For the agonies
of conscious- ness before it no rest nor
mollification can be until the dawn of
a new consciousness.
Ivan's being reaches back to the
first be- ginnings of all, though at first
he seems to live wholly under the
present Dispensation, his mind to be our
mind, his instincts to be our instincts.
" You are going to perform an
act of heroic virtue," says the Devil
to him, " and you don't believe
in virtue." That is an instinct
that be- longs to our day, the day of
two thousand years, which has been since
Christ was made man. It has been
engendered in man's soul by the law
of Love. But there was a Law before
the Christian Law, of an eye for
an eye and a tooth for a tooth,
in the age before the word had been
uttered that a man should leave his
father and his brethren, when the
father was the chief and king, his
sanctity inviolate and his authority
unquestioned. This law, too, lives on in
the profounder deeps of Ivan's soul ; he
who, loathing his father, had said
with the deliberate intention of his
conscious mind : " Let one reptile
devour the other," could not abide by
his word. Even the blood bond of the
old Law which united him in
subservience to
234
his begetter, the loyalty to destroy
whose sanc- tions not Ivan's inhumanly acute
and probing brain was necessary, for it
had been done centuries before his birth,
was too strong for this lover of
freedom. Though his mind may insist that
all things are lawful, one thing is
not, and not even in the kingdom
of the old Law is his freedom real.
" He hated Mitya just because he
was the murderer of his father. He
was conscious of this and fully recognised
it to himself." Perhaps he might
have stood his ground against the onslaught
from the un- known within him, and by recognising
that so much of his soul was based
in the past, have accomplished the miracle
that Nikolay Stav- rogin died in attempting—
to tear himself away from that whence
his being was nourished. But there are
deeper instincts than this, and these he
cannot recognise and live. The Babel tower
of his reason is tumbled at a
blow : and all the anguish of
problems unsolved and belief denied is but
a drop in an ocean of pain, when the
veil of his consciousness is suddenly rent,
and the dark and gloomy knowledge
comes to him that there is in him,
not only that which hates the murderer
of his unclean father, but that which
by foul and devious ways compassed his
death. The Ivan which listened on the
stairs in the night, and gave to
Smerdyakov
235
not the blow another Ivan would, but
sweet words — this self he must behold, and
dare not. For this beast is not
violent and strong and human, like the
hate which goes out of him against
Dmitri for his sacrilege, but a creeping
thing which crawls and whines and is
not man. It is Smerdyakov himself in
him : for his actions Ivan can feel
nothing of the triumph of the stern and
cruel justice that was also in the
old time before him, but only everlasting
shame. " One reptile has devoured
the other," and the devouring reptile
is not Dmitri, but in him. The revelation
of this beast haunts him not merely
with terror, but with the menace of
ultimate degradation. Though all things be
lawful and his mind cling to that
con- viction with certainty indubitable, the works
of this loathsome and obscene thing
are not and can never be. They can
never be justified ./'at the bar of
his consciousness, for they are not his
: he must deny them, although their
justi- fication depends upon his acceptance of
them. They are his, yet he did not
will them ; they are not his, then
he is not his. The dilemma is awful
and beyond all escaping. His own self
is shattered in twain, and worse than
shattered, for in spite of denial and
his frenzied clinging to his consciousness, a
seed has been sown with- in him of
doubt intolerable, whose horror will
236
drive him mad, that this thing is
all himself and he is no other.
In Ivan the divided being of man,
the rend- ing asunder of those inseparable
elements which we call mind and body
reaches the last extremity of suffering. It
seems even that in him Stavrogin's
suffering has been passed, but that is
because the anatomy of Ivan's being is
more plainly revealed by Dostoevsky's grim
and inexorable knife than that of
Stavrogin. Alike they stand on the brink
of sheer annihila- tion. Life in them seems
to have come to its final and
terrible flowering in a consciousness which wills
the destruction of the larger life of
which it is only a fragment or
a form. And in Ivan the most ghastly
tragedy of all is revealed. These heroic
and terrible spirits who burn out their
mortal lives in the superhuman effort to
assert themselves, their personalities, their
wills, their consciousness, against the universe,
who with desperate courage take their stand
upon the one firm rock amid the
desolate waste of waters, which is their
conscious existence, and hurl defiance, even
in defeat, at the great whole of
which they are members, find at the
last that the rock crumbles like sand
beneath their feet. They are not
themselves, but another. There is neither
Being beyond them, nor within them.
237
Truly, the end is at hand. What
remedy or hope of reconciliation can be
brought to these minds, which are our
own ? If we have not attempted what
they have attempted, it is be- cause we
are less than they, we are not other
than they. They are the perfection of
the spirit which is in us. Is there
for this spirit a Way of life ?
In Father Zossima's person and teaching,
the Way of Christ is put forward
in its final and perfect form. No
more than at any time before is it
the religion of Christianity. The reasoning
of an Ivan, which was Dostoevsky's
own, had put a barrier for ever
between him and a simple faith in the
divinity of Christ, the Son of God.
Not idly was Father Zossima's orthodoxy
sus- pect to the monks of the monastery
; he, and Dostoevsky with him, was a
Christian after the order of Ernest Renan.
His teaching is based upon an unbounded
reverence for Christ the man. Christ was
for him the ideal of human action
under the present dispensation ; but the
way of Christ was a solution for
conduct and not for belief. Perhaps in
some words of Kirillov the true nature
of Dostoevsky's atti- tude to Christ is
most plainly manifested. On the night when
he was to murder himself to assert
his self-will in the highest point,
because, there being no God, it rested
with him to prove
238
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
his own divinity, Kirillov cried
ecstatically to Pyotr Verhovensky : —
Listen to a great idea : there
was a day on earth, and in the
midst of the earth stood three
crosses. One on the Cross had so much
faith that he said to another, "
To-day thou shalt be with Me in
Paradise." The day ended ; both died
and passed away and found neither Paradise
nor resurrection. His words did not come
true. Listen : that man was the
loftiest of all on earth. He was that
which gave meaning to life. The whole
planet, with everything on it, is
mere mad- ness without that man. There
never has been any like Him before or
since, up to a miracle. For that is
the miracle, that there never was or
never will be another like Him. And
if that is so, if the laws of
nature did not spare even Him, have
not spared even their miracle, and made
even Him live for a lie and die
for a lie, then all the planet
is a lie and rests on a lie and
mockery. . . .
Yet what man had done he might
do again. He might love all humanity
for its suffering, and take all men's
sins upon himself. " Suffer- ing is
life," said the Devil. Says Father
Zos- sima : "If the evil doing
of man moves you to indignation and
overwhelming distress, even to a desire for
vengeance on the evil-doers, shun above all
things that feeling. Go at once and seek
suffering for yourself as though you were
guilty of that wrong. Accept that suffering
and bear it and you will find
comfort. . . ."
239
What is this save to still the
insurgent con- sciousness, which demands an
answer to the problem of Evil, by the
anodyne of pain ; and indeed the
condition of not wanting a solution is
perhaps in itself a solution. But
suffering is one thing, and love is another.
In The Journal of an Author Dostoevsky
had let fall a pro- founder word :
" The consciousness that you can bring
no help to suffering humanity can change
the love you bore it into hatred
of that humanity." The way of
suffering is easier than the way of
love, and Dostoevsky's Christianity proves to
be only another " lacera- tion."
But there is a mystical side to
Father Zos- sima's teaching, which, if it
was not dearer to Dostoevsky's heart than
the way of Christ, was nearer to his
thought. Father Zossima's words are saturated
with the expectation of the Second Advent,
not in any literal, but in a symbolic
sense. He does not speak of it
outright, as Dostoevsky himself seems hardly
to have spoken of it definitely, but
the expectation is there.
And can it be a dream that in
the end man will find his joy only
in deeds of light and mercy, and
not in cruel pleasures as now ? .
. . I firmly believe that it is
not, and that the time is at
hand. . . . Our people will shine
forth in the world, and all men
will say : " The
240
stone which the builders rejected has
become the head stone of the corner.
..." " For the sake of the
humble and meek the days shall be
shortened. ..."
Like Shatov, Father Zossima believes in the
second Advent ; like Shatov, he believes
that it will come to pass in Russia.
It is easier to ridicule this naive
eschatology than to appreci- ate the deep
metaphysical truth which lies be- hind the
tremendous symbolism of the Apo- calypse. To
state it in words less awful than
those which were given to the apostle
in Patmos is to diminish from its
significance ; but, since it must be
interpreted, the second Advent im- plies the
sudden revelation of a new conscious- ness,
when all eternity shall be gathered
into a moment, when there shall be no
more division between the body and the
soul and no more barriers between the
knower and that which is known, when
there shall be no more time. The
second Advent is the miracle upon
which waits the present Dispensation of
agony and conflict and sickness and death,
for the new conscious- ness will be a
consciousness of harmony. The soul of man
will go out into the Universe and be
lost and found again, for within it
is the seed of a timeless being.
Father Zossima's teaching is full of a
prescience of that which will be. J Much
on earth is hidden from us," he
says,
Q 241
tt
but to make up for that we have
been given a precious mystic sense of
our living bond with the other world,
the higher heavenly world, and the roots
of our thoughts and feelings are not
here but in other worlds." Father
Zossima speaks to those who have learned
to hear, and his language is veiled ;
yet it is plain. He hints at a
future condition of being when nothing that
is hidden shall not be revealed, and
the chasm between the timeless world and
the world in time spanned at a
bound by the new man. That was
Dostoevsky's hope : it is not fantastic.
Most men have had in their lives some
premonition of a new being, of that
which by mortality they are not, and
yet most truly are. Dostoevsky fought his
way to the extreme edge of the
knowable, and his latter days were spent
peering into the unknown. Into the un-
known he flung himself, fevered by the
intense strain of poise over the
unfathomable. He tried to speak unutterable
things, and to fling his imagination into
futurity. The Brothers Karamazov was his
final effort, to bring his hope within
his consciousness, to create the symbol of
that which is to come.
And the symbol he created is a
character utterly unlike all that went before —
Alyosha Karamazov. Alyosha in the midst of
the welter of his father's swinishness,
Dmitri's fever of
242
moral agony and Ivan's torment of the
divided person, is, as it were, born
good. He is the miracle. Even though
he comes to know him- self for a
sensualist, for the son of his father,
and to doubt the God in whom he
has unhesi- tatingly believed, he remained good.
Dosto- evsky intended to follow his
fortunes further, but we know that whatever
they might have been, Alyosha will remain
positive and whole and good. The trials
and doubts which begin to assail him
are but the condition of his humanity.
However great and overwhelming they be, he
has the irrefragable assurance of harmony
that he never can forget. He is sure
of life and of his own part in
it.
But he remains the miracle. It is
the quality of miracle that makes him
Dostoevsky's hero. In him, through some
mysterious alchemy, the clouded and sombre
fires of the Karamazov spirit burn with
a white pure flame. He is the new,
incomprehensible birth ; he belongs to the
city that is to be in which
Dostoevsky, like Shatov, proclaimed through
clenched teeth that he would believe. The
great spirit which broods over the waters
and bears destruction, death and decay in
its womb, breaks out at the last into
this marvellous flower. It works blindly
and beyond the knowledge of man. The
great minds that would understand, as
243
Dostoevsky had so passionately laboured to
understand, end in self-destruction like Stav-
rogin and Svidrigailov. Dostoevsky knew that
their end is inevitable, but deeper
than his knowledge he felt that though
Stavrogin dies and the light of the
human spirit seems to have been quenched
life goes on. The death and desolation
which attend the searching of the great
men who assume the full burden of humanity
is not the final word : out of
their chaos is born the child who knows.
Thus miraculously, Alyosha is born a lover
of humanity. Like a bright flower he
springs to the light out of the
degradation of his fathers ; like a
flower he is free from the tor- ment
of earthly personality. His self sweeps
with an instinctive movement outward and
into the universe, beyond doubts and
dialectic to the blinding assurance of
eternal harmony. At the moment when he
is left most utterly alone, then does
his spirit comprehend the world.
He did not stop on the steps
either, but went quickly down ; his
soul overflowing with rapture, yearning for
freedom, space, openness. The vault of
heaven, full of soft shining stars,
stretched out vast and fathomless above
him. The Milky Way ran in two pale
streams from the zenith to the horizon.
The fresh, motionless, still night enfolded
the earth.
244
The white towers and golden domes of
the cathedral gleamed out against the
sapphire sky. The gorgeous autumn flowers,
in the beds round the house, were
slumbering till morning. The silence of
the earth seemed to melt into the
silence of the stars. The mys- tery of
the earth was one with the mystery
of the stars.
Alyosha stood, gazed and suddenly threw
himself down on the earth. He did not
know why he em- braced it. He could
not have told why he longed so
irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss it
all. But he kissed it weeping, sobbing
and watering it with his tears, and
vowed passionately to love it, to
love it for ever and ever. "
Water the earth with the tears of
your joy and love those tears," echoed
in his soul.
What was he weeping over ?
Oh, in his rapture he was weeping
even over those stars which were shining
to him from the abyss of space, and
he was not ashamed of that ecstasy.
There seemed to be threads from all
those innumerable worlds of God linking his
soul to them, and it was trembling
all over in contact with other
worlds. He longed to forgive everyone and
for everything and to beg forgiveness. Oh,
not for himself, but for all men, for
all and for everything. " And
others are praying for me too," echoed
again in his soul. But with every
instant he felt clearly and as it
were tangibly that something firm and
unmistakable as that vault of heaven had
entered into his soul. It was as
though some idea had seized the sovereignty
of his mind — and it was for all
his life and for ever and ever. He
had fallen on the earth a weak boy,
but he rose up a resolute champion,
and he knew and felt it suddenly at
the very moment of his ecstasy. And
never, never, all his life long could
Alyosha forget that minute. . . .
245
FY ODOR DOSTOEVSKY
Alyosha is the only one of all
Dostoevsky's characters to whom this consummation
is vouchsafed. The others had sought the
moment bitterly and with tears, and they
found only barrenness and death. Kirillov,
maddened by the tyranny of his idea,
had a glimpse of this vision in his
delirium, and then took his own life
to prove that he had attained to the
supreme point of self-will. Myshkin himself knew
it only in sickness : he was an
outcast peering through the gates of
heaven, wherein the fly had his part,
but not he. But to Alyosha it is
given freely. "To him that hath it
shall be given : from him that hath
not shall be taken away even that
which he hath." Dostoevsky's great heart
knew too well that to the man who
seeks this consumma- tion is denied. It was
denied to him. But in spite of
denial, he believed ; he could not but
believe, even as he could not but
disbelieve. He who was Stavrogin, and knew
himself for such a man, could not
remain in his condition. His soul yearned
for the miracle, the process incomprehensible,
whereby the weary soul might be born
anew and burst forth again upon the
world strong in the newness of its
spirit.
But he knew that " except the
corn of wheat fall into the ground
and die, it bringeth not forth
fruit." The consummation of
belief and
246
full acceptance could come only with
a new birth. The life and death of
a Stavrogin or a Svidrigailov is the
labour pangs of the mind of the world
; the pain and chaos of the mighty
blind Karamazov spirit strives towards creation
by paths which the human consciousness,
though working in the light of its
extreme in- candescence, cannot discover. The
force which by its own inward contradiction
drives the men of this world to
self-annihilation and the void, in another
world evolves a mighty youth, from whose
open eyes no secrets are hid. From
the womb of lust and destruction
leaps forth the child of life.
Alyosha belongs to the new world, wherein
even the physical being of man is
changed. He walks in light, while his
brothers are in darkness. Yet his history
is blent with theirs. For these things
are entwined together — life and its incarnate
justification. The other world into which
Alyosha was born, neighbours this : the
old Adam and the new man must walk
hand in hand. And those troubled spirits,
Fyodor Pavlovitch, Ivan, Dmitri, Grushenka
recognise the virtue that is in the
new-born Alyosha ; nay, their hopes are
set in him. He is an answer to
their doubts such as no mon- astery nor
elder, nor even their own seeking could
give.
247
The creation of this character is the
crown of Dostoevsky's final striving to
relate by a living symbol that eternal
harmony of which Myshkin and Kirillov had
glimpses so terrible to the life of
doubt and struggle into which those visions
burst, like lightning fires. He knew that
it was impossible for men of the old
Dispensation to bear more than these dread
momentary flashes from the world where
there is no more time. At those
moments, said Kirillov, man must be
physically changed or die. Therefore he
must die, and be born anew, a shining
soul in the new Dispensation. Only thus
in the splendour of a new and perfect
birth, can mortal eyes look steadily
upon the harmony of all things.
This is a hard saying : and here
truly is a mystery and a miracle. Yet
this is a miracle that must be. The
same conscious- ness which tells us that
Stavrogin is the end, tells us also
that he cannot be the end ; for
the consciousness which looks on life and
finds it barren, and its end in
death, is also the pin- nacle, the perfect
symbol, of the great process of becoming
that denies death. The spirit of man
trembles in the last agony of living
death, and the consciousness which must
deny life has at the last gained the
mastery of the body which must
affirm. The tyrannous mind will
248
slay the whole%of which it is but
a pait ; and in a Stavrogin, a
Svidrigailov or a Kirillov the murder is
accomplished. The spirit of man is sick
unto death ; and this agony is the
final word of the epoch of life in
which we live. Though the world of
Dostoevsky may seem to us wild and
strange, it is ours : he showed forth
its being to us in his mighty
parables. The Brothers Karamazov is the
last and greatest of these, for in it
Dostoevsky made the super- human effort to
hold the past and future to- gether in
an eternal present.
The father is the blind force of
life, which arose we know not how. It
brooded over the face of the waters.
Taking the forms of life, high and
low, birds of the air and creeping
things, obscene, terrible and beautiful, it
rose through slime and lust and agony
to man. Old Karamazov is life under
the old Dispensation. He is a force
and no more ; he does not know
himself for what he is. He contains
within himself the germ of all
potentialities, for he is chaos unresolved.
He is loathsome and terrible and strong,
for he is life itself.
And this old Life is slain by
his sons, for by the death of the
old Life and the breaking of the old
Covenant, the new Life lives and the
new Covenant is established. And the form
of the new Life that descends upon
the chaos
249
of the father is Christ.
Dmitri and Ivan are divided from the
loins of their begetter by the knowledge
of good and evil. That force
which was one and unresolved in their
father knows itself and is divided in
them. Dmitri is body conscious of
mind, Ivan is mind conscious of
body. They live under the
present Dispensa- tion, as we ourselves have
lived and live. In their life
they seek each his consummation. Ivan
spends his being in the tormenting search
for the ultimate resolution of his
doubts in some absolute in which his
mind can repose ; Dmitri his in the
quest for the absolute satis- faction of
physical love. Yet for all
their tor- ment and the force of their
passion their desires are unfulfilled.
They cannot be fulfilled. The body
rebels against the final triumph of
mind ; the mind rejects
the heaven of the body's
satisfaction. When Ivan in his dream
reaches to the very pinnacle of the
seeking of his con- sciousness, he is
overthrown not by the barren issue of
his passionate dialectic, but by the
knowledge that there is that within
him which will not suffer the conclusions
of his mind. The " sticky
buds " draw him from the triumph
of his final negation ; the
conviction suddenly rising from his depths,
long suspected and long denied, that in
the last recesses of his being is the
beast, or what to the tyrannous mind
is
250
beast-like, makes a mockery
of his terrible philosophy.
And Dmitri is overthrown at the end
of his tumultuous seeking by the protesting
mind. He who was so sure of the
beast within him, who could say with
such assurance that it was only "
some damnable curve " in Grushenka's
body that he loved, in a moment
comes to the knowledge that it is
something else of which he stands in
need so passionate. Not all the sexual
ecstasies he may compass, not all the
dreams of fair women incarnated to do
him service, will satisfy him now. That
way, too, is barren. It is the "
something else " which mocks him in
his mad career. This, he knows, will
tame the beast and make him beautiful.
And in his despair that he will
never attain to this and hold it in
his grasp, he rides to Mokroe with a
case of pistols to " make
way." " Are you a driver ?
" he says to Andrey while he lashes
his galloping horses.
" Then you know that one has
to make way. What would you say to
a driver who wouldn't make way for
anyone, but would just drive on and
crush people ? One can't run over
a man. One can't spoil people's lives.
And if you have spoilt a life, punish
yourself. ... If only you've spoilt, if
only you've ruined anyone's life — punish
yourself and go away."
251
That is the despairing voice of the
physical man when physical things have
failed. His fierce instinct fails him ;
a moment has come when he knows it
will never satisfy the deeper need, and
in that moment he is overthrown. He
must bow his head before the power
that urges him to the repose which
lies beyond all satisfaction of the body.
And in those wonder- ful moments which come
before the last morti- fication of his
physical body, when he sits naked and
shivering before the blind officers of Law,
" particularly loathing the coarse, flat,
crooked nail on his right big
toe," he has the fulfilment of a
moment in the knowledge that he has
rejected his old seeking. The ecstasy of
the physical body is barren. In his
new passionate desire for that which
is beyond the body, he can deny the
flesh.
" Don't touch me ..." Grushenka
faltered in an imploring voice. "
Don't touch me till I'm yours. . . .
I've told you I'm yours . . .
but don't touch me . . spare me.
. . . With them here, with them
close, you mustn't. He's
here. It's nasty here. .
. ."
" I'll obey you ! I won't
think of it. ... I worship you !
" muttered Mitya. " Yes, it's
nasty here. It's abominable."
t: Let us be good, not brutes,
but good," says Grushenka. And
Mitya knows that somewhere
252
THE BROTHERS K ARAM AZOV
in those words is the condition which
he seeks. At the last the body fails
him, and he too must stand hoping for
the miracle, for the rebirth of his
divided being into harmony.
So in Ivan and Dmitri is manifest
the failure of the divided being of
the present Dispensation. The body knows
itself for evil, and at the last
obeys the bidding of the mind and
seeks a good beyond the body. -But
the good of the mind is the denial
of the bocIy\ AricTmind that knows
itselLfor goodls~at the last confounded by
the whisper of the body, and must
confess that goocT is barren without the
body and therefore
not good at all. Neither body
can deny mind, nor mind body ;
yet they-must denyT"
In the story they are reconciled in
Alyosha. Alyosha is their mutual victory,
the new man. Their father was, Dmitri
and Ivan are, Alyosha is to be.
Dmitri and Ivan have slain their father,
now must they slay themselves. In their
death is the beginning of the miracle
of the new birth. The present age is
ended in suffering and gloom ; from
its loins springs forth the new harmony.
Alyosha is a perfect being in body,
and his mind is in harmony with his
body's perfection. He, the actual Alyosha,
is only a symbol of what is to
come. He has the waking consciousness of
the harmony of all things, his
heart-strings echo to other worlds.
253
He will deny nothing. He steps out
from the monastery into the world, yet,
being in the world, he is not of
it, for he walks in the paths of
the world to come. His mind
tyrannises not over his body, nor his
body oppresses his mind. He is a
being beautiful, conscious only of his
unity, and feeling within himself that
which binds him to all humanity, the
knowledge that he is the appointed end
of all their striving.
Yet he is at the bottom rung of
the ladder whereon Dmitri has reached the
fourteenth, for he is born out of
time. He is a symbol, and he must
needs put on the common clay. But
these trials will not touch him, for
he is secure. He has his consummation,
and the knowledge of it will never
leave him ; for, though he is clothed
in our flesh and lives in our
time he belongs to that world wherein
" there shall be no more time
" and to that order of life when
" man must be physically
changed." Dosto- evsky spoke in parables
because the old thought could not define
his vision, which is nothing less than
the passing away of one phase of the
human consciousness and the coming of
another. The language of this consciousness
is impotent before the vision of the
conscious- ness which is to come.
Nevertheless, is more than a parable,
even in its promise, for
254
that which is to come, also is
and has been. It is eternally. Therefore
Alyosha lives and has his being on
this earth and his soul is knit
closely with the things that are here
and now. The miracle of his birth
from among the Kar- amazov foulness is
a miracle in time, though it is
wrought by a power which is timeless.
Alyosha is the incarnation of an
eternal idea, yet he is wholly man.
What Dostoevsky had failed to create in
Myshkin, he magnificently achieved in Alyosha.
Myshkin was sick ; ^ Alyosha is whole.
What Myshkin saw in the ecstasy of
disease, Alyosha beholds with waking eyes.
He is not fashioned, as Myshkin was,
out of the strange delirium of the
present Dispensation, but created new and
young and whole out of the future.
Myshkin is built after the pattern of
Christ ; he is as it were a reven-
ant who looks upon his handiwork
after two thousand years. He has, indeed,
no right " to add ought to that
which He did say of old " ;
he can do no more to the Grand
Inquisitor than to kiss him upon his
bloodless lips. He com- prehends that which
his words have brought to pass, but
he cannot add to those words/: he can
but stroke Rogozhin's head in the sjlence
of that gloomy house, and mutter incompre-
hensible words by the unearthly beauty of
the body of the dead Nastasya.
He passes back,
255
silently as he came, into the
darkness of the mind, nothing accomplished,
no new way shown, no new being lived.
He is old and pale and weary.
And Dostoevsky, the mighty conjurer of the
mighty dead, was pale and weary too.
With the passing of Myshkin, the virtue
of Mysh- kin's archetype passed from the
writer's spirit. He brought him back to
the earth in the dreadful courage of
despair, if haply he, coming again, might
be the light of the world once more.
But the light was dim by the black
darkness which it first had shown ;
it was put out by the night itself
had created two thou- sand years ago. The
man who feels within him- self the
incessant hunger and thirst for an answer
to his agonising doubts, and has for
a moment seen the light of certainty,
and after a moment's mad happiness watched
it fade away and the old chill
despair return — such a man may know a
little of the agony of Dosto- evsky, when,
despite all his hopes and prayers, he
first felt within him that the being
he had summoned from the dead, and on
whose in- carnation he had spent his mortal
strength, could achieve nothing against the
dark forces of the world. This was no
mere book tragedy : this was more
than a waste of the human spirit.
This was the defeat of Christ
Himself, in the
256
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
mind of one who, even in the
depths of the under- world and in defiance
of the mind which drove him to
unbelief, obscurely and by devious ways had
put his final trust in Him — not in
His divinity, but in His perfect humanity,
as that of a Man by whom life
might yet be guided and escape destruction.
But in the final scene of The Idiot
this hope, too, was shattered. For this
was not a writer who bore his
books along to some foregone conclusion.
With him, each of his great final
works was a desperate battle- ground wherein
his spirit fought all night long against
despair. He put on the invisible armour
of his last champion Christ, and he
was vanquished. V ictus es, O
Galilaee.
Not out of the past should the
victor come, nor by any means out of
the extreme present. That issue he tried
next and most terribly in The Possessed.
But that victory must be his being
could not doubt, even as his conscious-
ness could not escape from vanity and
death. was the supreme effort of his
life-long struggle. Not out of the past
like Myshkin, not out of the present
like Stavrogin, but out of the future
should his last champion come, Alyosha
Karamazov. On this battlefield, past, present,
and future should strive together ; and
though of the great battle which he
foresaw, this time with the light of
R 257
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
triumph in his eyes, mortality cheated
him, he had the assurance of victory
in the future man. Alyosha was imagined
and endured. The gates of hell could
not prevail against him. For him, and
for him alone, Dostoevsky could throw down
the proud challenge of his waking vision.
He had seen the harmony of all
things, and the knowledge should never pass
away from him.
But with every instant he felt
clearly and as it were tangibly that
something firm and unshakable as that vault
of heaven had entered into his soul.
It was as though some idea had seized
the sovereignty of his mind — and it was
for all his life and for ever
and ever. He had fallen on the earth
a weak boy, but he rose up a
resolute champion, and he knew and
felt that sud- denly at the very moment
of his ecstasy. . . .
This Alyosha, the resolute champion, is not
a Christian. He has passed beyond the
Christian revelation. He is not Myshkin,
but Myshkin went to his making, so
did Stavrogin, and his brothers and his
father. He is that in which their
agonies should be justified. He may not
believe in God, he may know himself
for a sensualist, yet he is not
confounded, for his knowledge of the great
Oneness needs no belief in God for its
support, and the beast which he knows
within him is no more a beast. He
has transcended these sublunary things.
258
Their names are but earthly and
blunted sym- bols for the reality which
bears within him. He is fair and
comely ; his outward bears the impress
of his inward harmony ; his body and
his spirit together are modulated by
the sweet music of other worlds. He is
the man who is the promise of all
humanity, for whom the old problems are
solved by his very being and are not.
259