Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov

Julian W Connolly

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781623560508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is unquestionably one of the greatest works of world literature. With its dramatic portrayal of a Russian family in crisis and its intense investigation into the essential questions of human existence, the novel has had a major impact on writers and thinkers across a broad range of disciplines, from psychology to religious and political philosophy. This proposed reader's guide has two major goals: to help the reader understand the place of Dostoevsky's novel in Russian and world literature, and to illuminate the writer's compelling and complex artistic vision. The plot of the novel centers on the murder of the patriarch of the Karamazov family and the subsequent attempt to discover which of the brothers bears responsibility for the murder, but Dostoevsky's ultimate interests are far more thought-provoking. Haunted by the question of God's existence, Dostoevsky uses the character of Ivan Karamazov to ask what kind of God would create a world in which innocent children have to suffer, and he hoped that his entire novel would provide the answer. The design of Dostoevsky's work, in which one character poses questions that other characters must try to answer, provides a stimulating basis for reader engagement. Having taught university courses on Dostoevsky's work for over twenty years, Julian W. Connolly draws upon modern and traditional approaches to the novel to produce a reader's guide that stimulate the reader's interest and provides a springboard for further reflection and study.

CHAPTER ONE

Contexts

Dostoevsky’s life

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born on 30 October [Old Style] 1821 in Moscow, Russia. He was the second son of a retired military doctor, Mikhail Andreevich Dostoevsky, who had an appointment and an apartment at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in an impoverished district of the city. The doctor was a proud and exacting individual subject to pronounced moments of depression and irritability. Dostoevsky’s mother, Maria Fyodorovna (née Nechaeva), in contrast, was a warm and loving woman who taught Fyodor to read and instilled in him a religious spark that remained with him for the rest of his life. She would take her elder children (she had eight in all) on annual visits to the Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery, about 50 miles northeast of Moscow. Due to his diligent service to the State, Mikhail Dostoevsky earned the right to enter the ranks of the Russian nobility, and in 1828 he registered himself and his two sons, Mikhail and Fyodor, in the rolls of the nobility in Moscow. Three years later, he acquired a small estate called Darovoe, and it was here that young Fyodor spent some of his happiest summer months as a child. In 1833, he and his older brother Mikhail began attending a day school in Moscow, and a year later they moved on to Chermak’s boarding school, one of the best in Moscow. They would spend the work week at the school and return home on the weekends. Dostoevsky would later depict the contrast he experienced between the rigors of school and the warmth of the home in his first novel, Poor Folk (Bednye liudi, 1846).

Dostoevsky’s life changed dramatically at the end of the 1830s. His beloved mother died in February 1837, and later that year Fyodor and Mikhail would be taken by their father to St. Petersburg to prepare for entrance into the Academy of Military Engineers, thus undertaking a career path for which Fyodor had little enthusiasm. The two young men entered the Academy in 1838, and although Fyodor took all the required engineering classes, his real interests lay in the realm of literature. He became swept up in the contemporary enthusiasm for literary Romanticism, particularly German Romanticism, including the works of E. T. A. Hoffman, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller. A voracious reader, he engaged in heated exchanges about literature with a few close friends, and he became editor of the student newspaper.

While Dostoevsky was at the Academy, he received shocking news from home: his father was found dead in June 1839 under very mysterious circumstances. Although the official cause of death was reported to be a stroke, rumor had it that Mikhail Andreevich had been murdered by peasants outraged at abuses he had committed on his estate, to which he had retreated after the death of his wife. Although there is scant evidence of Dostoevsky’s personal feelings about the event, a likely consequence was a heightened sensitivity to the issue of class injustice in the Russian countryside, where a large percentage of the populace were serfs under the dominion of their gentry landowners.

In 1841, Dostoevsky was promoted to the rank of field ensign-engineer, and he now could live outside the Academy while taking continuing to take classes there. His graduation from the Academy followed in 1843 and he was assigned to a drafting position in the St. Petersburg Engineering Command. He plugged away at this job for a year, and finally resigned his position in 1844, with the official discharge coming in October. Dostoevsky was now free to devote himself to his real passion—literary creativity. Although he had earlier tried his hand at historical dramas (Mary Stuart and Boris Godunov, neither of which has survived), Dostoevsky’s first published work was a translation of Honoré de Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet (1844). He also began working on what would become his first novel, Poor Folk. This short novel in letters, which chronicles the travails of an elderly clerk and a young woman living in severely straitened circumstances, achieved immediate success among the important literati of the day, including the critic Vissarion Belinksy. Dostoevsky was elated by the praise showered upon him, only to have his ego crushed with the appearance of his second novel, The Double (Dvoinik), which features an undistinguished bureaucrat who believes that his position at work and in society is being taken over by a conniving double. Critics panned the work, seeing it as little more than an imitation of stories by the celebrated Russian writer Nikolay Gogol. Discouraged, Dostoevsky published only one work in 1847, a story of obsession entitled “The Landlady” (“Khoziaika”). In 1848, however, Dostoevsky’s productivity increased, and that year saw the publication of several short stories, including “A Weak Heart” (“Slaboe serdtse”), and the lyrical “White Nights” (“Belye nochi”).

While working on his these texts Dostoevsky also took part in social groups devoted to the discussion of current events in politics and society as well as literature. One group that met in the home of Mikhail Petrashevsky debated prospects for reform in Russian society, but Dostoevsky became drawn to a smaller group with more radical aims. This group, which met at the apartment of Alexander Palm and Sergei Durov, debated prospects for publishing subversive propaganda on an illegal printing press. These plans never came to fruition, however, for in the wake of government uneasiness over the spread of revolutionary unrest in Europe in 1848, Dostoevsky was awakened in his apartment on the morning of 23 April 1849 and put under arrest for his association with the Petrashevsky circle. He was incarcerated in the Peter-Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg while the authorities investigated the group. A new novel by Dostoevsky, Netochka Nezvanova, which featured a young woman as the first-person narrator and protagonist, had begun appearing in a journal in 1849, but it was interrupted by Dostoevsky’s arrest, and he only managed to complete one short story, “A Little Hero” (“Malenkii geroi,” published 1857) during his imprisonment.

When the investigators finished their work, the court recommended the death sentence for Dostoevsky and his fellow “conspirators,” but this sentence was commuted by Tsar Nicholas I to a lesser punishment: four years of penal servitude to be followed by an indefinite term of service in the Russian army. In an act of stunning cruelty, the prisoners were not immediately told of their true sentences. On the contrary, they were led out to an execution site set up in Semenovsky Square, where their death sentences were read out to them. It was only then that an official came riding up on a horse to tell them of their true fate. Understandably, this experience affected Dostoevsky deeply, and it would play a role in his later fiction. That very day—22 December 1849—Dostoevsky wrote to his brother about his renewed appreciation for life: “Life is a gift, life is happiness, each minute could have been an eternity of happiness […] I swear to you I won’t lose hope and will preserve my heart and spirit in purity. I’ll be reborn for the better” (Complete Letters 1: 181).

Dostoevsky would spend four years in a prison labor camp in Omsk, Siberia, and during that entire time he was allowed no correspondence or reading material other than an edition of the New Testament given to him on the way to the camp. Released in January 1854, he later summarized the experience in a letter to his brother Andrey: “And those four years I consider a time during which I was buried alive and locked up in a coffin. I can’t even tell you, my friend, what a horrible time that was. It was inexpressible, unending suffering, because every hour, every minute weighed on my soul like a stone” (6 November 1854; Complete Letters 1: 201). Dostoevsky was more expansive about the difficulties of his internment in a letter he wrote to his brother Mikhail in February 1854, but the most comprehensive account is a fictionalized memoir entitled Notes from the Dead House (Zapiski iz mertvogo doma), published over ten years later (1860–62). There Dostoevsky not only provides vivid descriptions of the camp’s inhabitants, both good and evil, he also discloses the dreadful distortions of human conduct that arise when people are deprived of freedom.

Once out of prison, Dostoevsky served as a private in a battalion in Semipalatinsk. There he met his future wife, Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva. Isaeva was married, but her husband died in August 1855, and Dostoevsky began to woo the widow. In the autumn of 1855 Dostoevsky was promoted to the rank of non-commissioned officer, and he subsequently received a promotion to the rank of ensign on 1 October 1856. Early the next year, on 6 February 1857, he married Maria Dmitrievna. In January 1858, Dostoevsky begins seeking permission to be allowed to retire from the army and return to Western Russia. In March he received that permission, and he finally returned to St. Petersburg in December 1959, exactly ten years after he had left it. He had already resumed his literary activity during this time, and 1859 saw the publication of two satirical works, “Uncle’s Dream” (“Diadushkin son”) and “The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants” (“Selo Stepanchikovo i ego obitateli”). Back in St. Petersburg, Dostoevsky joined his brother Mikhail in starting a journal, Time (Vremia), which became the publishing outlet for a new novel, The Humiliated and the Insulted (Unizhennye i oskorblennye, 1861), which depicts the pathetic vulnerability of the weak before the predations of the strong.

In 1862, Dostoevsky took his first trip to Western Europe, and he recorded his reactions in a short book entitled Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniiakh, 1863). Here Dostoevsky excoriates the bourgeois smugness of the French, and depicts in vivid hues the capitalist hell he found in London. Europe, he realized, had become corrupt and venal and it had nothing more to offer Russia. In Russia itself, however, the political climate was anything but calm. The authorities closed down Dostoevsky’s journal Time in May 1863, because it had not supported with sufficient vigor the regime’s efforts to suppress the ongoing Polish independence movement. Dostoevsky had become involved in a love affair with a young woman named Apollinaria Suslova, and he made plans to travel to Italy with her in the summer of 1863. Preoccupied with financial concerns and the Time problem, Dostoevsky delayed his departure, and Suslova went on to Paris without him. Finally, Dostoevsky left St. Petersburg to join her, but lured by the fantasy of winning a fortune, stopped at a gambling spa on the way. When he arrived in Paris, he found that she had fallen in love with someone else, but he persuaded her to travel with him to Italy nonetheless. The trip was full of emotional turmoil, and Dostoevsky would transmute these intense personal experiences (tortured love, obsession with gambling) into his short novel The Gambler (Igrok, 1866).

Russia in the 1860s was awash with political debate. From Dostoevsky’s perspective, the leading progressives of the day were disturbingly under the sway of Western materialism and atheistic socialism, and he sought to meet this challenge both in his creative fiction and in his publicistic journalism. In Notes from the Underground (Zapiski iz podpol’ia, 1864) he champions the importance of individual free will in the face of deterministic schemes purporting to ensure human happiness. At the same time, through his depiction of the narrator, Dostoevsky reveals the corrosive consequences of a fear of intimacy, the refusal to allow oneself to be loved by (and to love) another person. Dostoevsky took up these issues again in one of his most famous novels, Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie, 1866), but in that work, his isolated hero Rodion Raskolnikov finds a path to redemption and salvation through the devotion of the selfless prostitute Sonya Marmeladov. Dead in spirit, the murderer Raskolnikov is resurrected by Sonya’s unconditional love.

Dostoevsky’s wife Maria died in 1864, and she was shortly followed in death by Dostoevsky’s beloved brother Mikhail. Increasingly burdened by debt in the mid-1860s, Dostoevsky signed a contract with a publisher named Stellovsky that required the submission of a new novel to Stellovsky by November 1, 1866; otherwise Dostoevsky would surrender the rights to all his future works without compensation for nine years. Frantic as the deadline approached, Dostoevsky hired a stenographer named Anna Grigorievna Snitkina, to whom he dictated The Gambler in just under a month’s time. Having met the terms of the contract, Dostoevsky asked the young woman to marry him, and she agreed. They got married on February 15, 1867, and she would bring a palpable measure of stability to the writer’s emotional and financial affairs.

Dostoevsky and his wife left Russia for Western Europe in April 1867, and they remained there for the next four years. While in Geneva, Anna gave birth to a baby girl named Sofia, but the great joy that the child brought the couple was cut short by the infant’s sudden death in May 1868. Dostoevsky’s immense grief is evident in a letter he wrote shortly after the event: “And now people tell me by way of consolation that I’ll have more children. But where is Sonya? Where is that little person for whom I state boldly that I would accept crucifixion if only she could be alive?” (18 May 1868; Complete Letters 3: 76). Dostoevsky’s shock at the untimely loss of his beloved daughter would inform Ivan Karamazov’s agonized reflections on the injustice of the suffering of children in The Brothers Karamazov, as well as his depictions of grief over the death of children in that novel. In time, Dostoevsky and his wife did have other children, including a daughter Lyubov, born in September 1869.

During this period, Dostoevsky worked on a new novel, (The Idiot, 1868), in which he hoped to depict a “perfectly beautiful human person” (“polozhitel’no prekrasnogo cheloveka” [Jan 1, 1868; Complete Letters 3: 17]). At the center of the novel stands Prince Lev Myshkin, an extraordinarily empathetic man who seems to draw out the latent conflicts and tensions within the people around him. Although his intentions are positive, he is unable to check the destructive passions unleashed in others, and the murder of the proud Nastasya Filippovna by the merchant Rogozhin plunges Myshkin into insanity. Dostoevsky also contemplated large novels dealing with the central issues of faith, sin, and the potential for regeneration. One project was entitled Atheism (Ateizm) while the other was a five-novel opus called The Life of a Great Sinner (Zhitie velikogo greshnika). Of the latter Dostoevsky wrote: “The main question, which is pursued in all the parts, is the same one that I have been tormented by consciously and unconsciously my whole life—the existence of God” (25 March 1870; Complete Letters 3: 248). Dostoevsky never completed these projects, however, for his attention was diverted by the murder of a Russian student in Moscow by a small group of political radicals in November 1869. Dostoevsky set out to write a “pamphlet novel” castigating these radicals, and he incorporated some elements of the undeveloped projects into this new work. The end product, a novel entitled The Devils (Besy, 1871–72), features a pair of characters who have a baleful impact on the society through which they move: the charismatic Stavrogin, who is haunted by a crime he committed against a child and seeks in vain for a way to assuage his guilt, and the demonic Pyotr Verkhovensky, who sews confusion and destruction among the gullible people taken in by his lies and deceptions.

In July 1871 the Dostoevsky family returned to Russia, and their first son, Fyodor, was born on July 16. Over the next few years, Dostoevsky continued his journalistic activity, most notably a series of columns entitled A Writer’s Diary (Dnevnik pisatelia), which eventually became an independent publication with an impressive number of individual subscribers. Dostoevsky used this outlet to publish his views in several genres, from sharply worded polemical essays to distinctive short stories, including “A Gentle Creature” (“Krotkaia,”1876) and “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” (“Son smeshnogo cheloveka,” 1877). He also published a novel called The Adolescent (Podrostok, 1875), but this representation of fractured family relations did not meet with widespread success. Dostoevsky eventually channeled his creative powers into the novel that would cap his illustrious career, The Brothers Karamazov (Brat’ia Karamazovy, 1879–80). During the writing of the novel, Dostoevsky’s youngest ...

Table of contents

• FC
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note on transliteration
• 1 Contexts
• 2 Language, form, and style
• 3 Reading The Brothers Karamazov
• 4 Critical reception, composition, and publishing history
• 5 Adaptation, interpretation, and influence
• 6 Guide to further reading
• 7 Index