The Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov is about the conflict between a father, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, and his sons, a powerful theme in western literature. Dmitri is his first son born to his first wife; Ivan (middle son) and Alyosha (the youngest) are born to his second wife. There is also Smerdyakov who it is strongly suggested is his illegitimate son of a street woman. He doesn't take much care of any of them, leaving them to the care of relatives, and lives as a drunken oaf engaging in orgies. Each son takes a different path in life: Alyosha enters an orthodox Christian seminary where he learns love and forgiveness, Ivan becomes a radical atheist intellectual who actually gets along and moves in with his father, and Dmitri competes with his father for his inheritance from his mother as well as the love of a woman Grushenka and is blamed for his murder, all of which which constitutes the main plot, and Smerdyakov who lives with the father as a servant and murders him under influence of the Ivan's philosophy.

The Brothers Karamazov was Fyodor Dostoyevsky's final novel; he died a year after its publication in 1881. Though the themes are universal in their reach, fully appreciating the novel requires knowing some facts about the author himself as well as the time he lived in. For instance, Dostoevsky had a son named Alyosha, the name of the youngest son in the novel, who died at age three from epilepsy.

It is claimed that when Dostoyevsky's own father died when he was 18 he had an epileptic seizure, though this has been disputed. Sigmund Freud made much of this in his essay on him in 1928, claiming that the episode represents his conflicted feelings towards his father who he in some way hated. That after Smerdyakov murders father Pavlovich he has an epileptic seizure connects the epilepsy to the Oedipal hatred of the father and love for his mother, who died after giving birth to Smerdyakov. The epilepsy both for Dostoevsky and Smerdyakov is an inability to process such feelings of aggression and remorse.

It's also widely held that his father was murdered by serfs. Fyodor's father Mikhail was a doctor wealthy enough to own property as well as serfs and was by accounts a cruel man. The alleged murder adds to the Oedipal feelings toward his father and sympathy for the peasants. The peasants did what he Dostoyevsky wanted in his heart, but was perhaps caused by the injustice of their social position and they did it perhaps collectively rather than individually. This myth would attest to Freud's own "primal horde" myth that the origin of religion comes from the collective murder of the father by his sons and the remorse felt motivated them to reify the father ideal for themselves as a social consciousness, in this case with the orthodox Christianity of the common people.

Father Karamazov seemingly represents the Russian state, as well as Dostoyevsky's own father. The reactionary autocratic Russian state of his time repressed attempts to improve the lot of the serfs and reveled in its own decadence. Dostoyevsky reviled the condition of the peasants which brought him to involvement in radical socialist politics, which aimed at freeing the lower class, reforming the state in a way he by himself is unable to do. Much like the alleged murder of his father by the serfs.

Dostoyevsky was arrested for his radical political activity and sentenced to death. At the last moment the Tsar gave reprieve and he was instead sent to exile in Siberia. This parallels Dmitri's arrest for the murder of his father and his own imprisonment in Siberia. While in Siberia Dostoevsky became more religious, owing to the near death experience which sent him there. He identified with the ideology of his jailers and abandoned radical politics, becoming a reactionary.

Though Dostoyevsky gave up his activity against the Russian state, the morality he adopted from orthodox Christianity still aimed at the liberation of the misery of the people. The values of unconditional love for all were most likely learned from his mother who was a sensitive caring woman. Father Zossima from whom Alyosha learns to go out into the world to promote love and forgiveness for all represents these maternal values, which Fyodor wishes he could have passed on to his own Alyosha. Fyodor's mother died before his father, just as Zossima dies before Pavlovich. Alyosha's attempt to this end takes place in the subplot with the schoolboys, one in particular Ilyusha who is sick and picked on by others. His condition is partly to blame on the debt squabbles of Alyosha's own family. Of course Ilyusha sounds pretty close to Alyosha, and he dies just like the real life child Alyosha.

Dostoyevsky's own Alyosha died of an epileptic seizure, a condition which Dostoyevsky most likely inherited from his own father. Had Alyosha lived he would have been raised with the values Dostoyevsky learned from his mother, but instead was killed by the father's condition. It will be the peasants, holding the values of his loved mother, who can end this nightmare of history perpetuated by the Russian state, which represents the values of his father. This is the latent message of The Brothers Karamazov.

The manifest message of The Brothers Karamazov is that all people must love one another and we can only find our own salvation by going out into the world and assist in the salvation of others. This is the doctrine Alyosha learns from father Zossima. It is also explicated in a parable about an old woman and an onion told by Grushenka. The woman lived a wicked life and was sent to hell. But there was one good deed she did, giving an onion to a beggar. God let her take hold of that same onion and told her that if she can hold onto it she will be lifted to heaven, but if the onion breaks she will stay in hell. She holds on and when she is almost free, other sinners hold on to her to be pulled out. The woman kicked them with her feet saying its her onion and only she is being saved for her deed. The onion breaks and she falls back to hell. If she had allowed others to share in her salvation, doing a good deed for others, she and the others would have made it to heaven. If everybody worked to save one another as they did for their self, everybody would make it and there would be no more evil in the world.

Opposing the manifest moral message is the philosophy of Ivan Karamazov, told in the famous poem The Grand Inquisitor. In the poem Jesus comes back to Earth during the Spanish Inquisition and is actually arrested, to be put to death the next day. While jailed he is told by the grand inquisitor that Jesus put an intolerable burden on mankind by giving them free will which is incompatible with happiness. Jesus rejected Satan's temptation to turn stones into bread, gain recognition as the messiah, and rule over the world in favor of freedom which would guarantee the suffering of man. So the Catholic Church has opted to take for itself the awful task of trying to understand God's creation and provide answers for the population who can be satisfied on bread alone, making Jesus' return problematic. "They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them...For it is but we, we the keepers of the great Mystery who will be miserable. There will be thousands of millions of happy infants, and one hundred thousand martyrs who have taken upon themselves the curse of knowledge of good and evil." Christ is silent throughout the inquisitor's speech and instead of responding kisses him. Alyosha after hearing the story kisses Ivan. This is supposed to mean that all the reason and discourse in the world won't save man, but only unconditional love. Reason leads to such awful conclusions. By such reasoning Ivan arrives at the conclusion that it isn't possible to love one's neighbors, but only at a distance for one can never experience the world the way others do and we all remain separate. Our Euclidean minds are also inadequate to understand the world and God himself Ivan concludes.

Ivan is portrayed and remembered as the rationalist atheist committed to socialism because of a profound nihilism, but this is also because he is very sensitive to the suffering in the world. However his deterministic naturalist philosophy has no room for evil and so discounts the feelings which haunt Ivan along with removing his free will to rectify the situation. When Smerdyakov murders father Pavlovich Ivan is haunted by the devil and goes mad.

The latent motivation for Dostoevsky's distrust of naturalism is that it justifies the murder of the father, much like the overthrow of the Russian state, because evil is not real but due to the actual activity of father Dostoyevsky, father Karamazov, and the Russian state which can be overcome with violence. Dostoevsky, given his near death experience from involvement with such politics as well as his continued epileptic episodes throughout his life, had to condemn this solution and its worldview. Nonetheless he never abandoned a moral critique of worldly power embodied in the Catholic Church in Ivan's poem and the Russian state in his life which removed the difficulty of understanding God and questioning the evil of the world from people in exchange for their freedom.

But unable to accept the solution taken by Smerdyakov, it is the flawed Dmitri who must be punished by the state and the theorist Ivan who must be driven mad by guilt. Dmitri for his part expressed in public his hatred of his father which is what leads to his arrest and imprisonment. It is simply unacceptable to express such feelings, and it is this which society cannot tolerate.

Freud said that The Brothers Karamazov is the greatest novel ever written. And he is right. The personal nature of the story in the form of a family drama, a manifest and latent one,  I think is what makes it so given the deep philosophical issues raised.

Dostoyevsky is a forerunner to existentialism given his preoccupation with freedom and the inability of reason to establish moral certainty and remove the dread of death. The famous quote "if God does not exist everything is permitted" attributed to the book is actually without God and the afterlife everything is permitted. It is told to Alyosha by Dmitri in a conversation he had with seminary student Rakitin who is an atheist (Joseph Stalin was in seminary too). "But what will become of men then?' I asked him, 'without God and immortal life? All things are lawful then, they can do what they like?" This is the dilemma of atheism from the existentialist point of view. Even if God cannot be established by fact or reason, many of society's morals aren't either and would also be invalid. This would make the good dependent on our actions and our dread of death found in our resistance to accept responsibility for our actions and the state of the world.

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My own take is that we just can't save everyone, and we shouldn't let that bother us. Only a small number of us have God's grace or if you're an atheist are destined to have a happy life, and you better hope you're one of them. Most people are just fucked and there is nothing we can do about it. Men struggle for their own salvation which even with the greatest effort it isn't guaranteed, it just isn't a group affair. Despair at this is a sign of a weak will, that you don't think you're going to be saved. We're all born with evil and aren't entitled to anything. In reality salvation from death and despair just like the consequences of all our actions are independent of our willing. Reasoning from the cause will only reveal it to be an effect of yet another cause, as does reasoning from the effect to the cause will only give you another effect. One ought to have confidence in the turning of worldly events and see that nothing too good or too bad is precluded or avoidable according to the laws of nature. Dostoyevsky abhorred this determinism, but it does give a certainty and rationalization of the course of history. It allows us to remove ourselves from the nightmare of history by seeing that all happens as it must and therefore can be understood and lived with as individuals.

The real question is wherever did people get the idea that life is supposed to have a meaning? The answer is that before we are born we are indistinguishable from our mother and have all of our needs provided in the womb. When we are born we are completely helpless and live in total dependency on others who answer our cries (all we are able to do). Even when we are physically independent and can stand on our own two legs, we never get over that helplessness and dependency on others. We take in the ideal of our parents, good and bad, for ourselves against a world which does not care for human wants. So we wish to see the authority of our parents in nature, a wish which grows greater with misfortune. The life of a complex organism is bound for tragedy given the great amount of time it takes to develop and the accompanying helplessness. Unfortunately this dependence on others removes us from the harsh reality of the external world and inculcates the expectation of a meaning for life acceptable for us. So it's good for us to face the truth through art from time to time.