We have arrived at the best-known section of Brothers Karamazov: the chapters “Rebellion” and “Grand Inquisitor,” which are narrated by Ivan to Alyosha. The fact that the most famous part of the novel comes in the voice of a character who articulates the counterpoint of the novel’s core idea of active love tells us something important about Dostoevsky’s approach to the novel. Literary critic M.M. Bakhtin wrote in his study Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics that Dostoevsky invented the polyphonic novel, a new form. He did so by incorporating a plurality of independent voices, none of which is given the final word. In a polyphonic novel, there is not a single narrator or narrative point of view that organizes and controls the other characters. There are no characters who serve as mouthpieces for the author’s own point of view. Dostoevsky creates three-dimensional characters who seem like they could exist without him and who are capable of making compelling arguments that Dostoevsky did not necessarily agree with. This form of the novel puts a greater burden on us as readers—we must navigate these different voices and points of view and sort out for ourselves what we think. We are granted both freedom and responsibility as readers in a novel that will not dictate how we derive meaning from it.

“Rebellion” and “Grand Inquisitor” are often excerpted and taught independent of the novel, often in philosophy or literature classes. There are multiple editions and translations of the two-chapter variant of The Brothers Karamazov to accommodate this approach.

This approach fundamentally misunderstands this novel and puts student readers into the position of only being able to misunderstand it. If they purchase this edition for a class, they don’t even own the rest of the novel. Consider some of the ideas we have encountered already in the novel:

• there exists a significant gap between philosophical systems and human life. The first can be abstract, can stand on its own, and can be expressed in a relatively simple way and the second resists abstraction, isolated meaning, and simplification.

• decontextualized ideas can be dangerous. We see Dmitry, for example, take particular interest in Miusov’s explanation of Ivan’s idea that if there is no afterlife, there is no morality, and “everything is permitted, even cannibalism.” We can see the appeal of this idea to someone who is in a murderous rage at his father.

• Human life resists philosophical and literary meaning. Living a meaningful life requires persistent effort and labor. We discover meaning through our experience of actively loving others while holding ourselves responsible for our actions and thoughts and for those of others.

• thinking can be moral or immoral. Fyodor Pavlovich’s immorality is first introduced to us by the fact that he regularly forgets he has children. Zosima regularly implores characters to be vigilant about their potential for self-deception.

• reading can be a formative and transformative activity via a process that requires personal investment and effort.

Taking two chapters that illustrate the philosophy of one character out of context is a kind of breathtaking shortcut that defies the foundation of The Brothers Karamazov. We are not meant to read these chapters as though their ideas emerged out of thin air. We are meant to read them as expressions of Ivan Karamazov, a young man who is suffering and struggling with deep spiritual questions.

As you read “Rebellion” and “Grand Inquisitor,” ask yourself: what is the difference between reading these chapters as philosophy independent of narrative context and reading them as part of a novel? How does your knowledge of Ivan shape how you understand his ideas in these chapters? What are the strengths of his positions? What are the limits of his ideas, and why do these feel important for how we understand his character at this moment in time?

As we consider these questions, we will be able to appreciate the form of Brothers Karamazov and its approach to using stories to convey meaning (in much the same way the Gospels use parables).

Key passages:

p. 267-8. Smerdyakov’s disturbing ideas.

p. 273-4. Ivan’s thirst for life, his desire to “love life more than its meaning.”

p. 277-80. Ivan’s explanation of why he wants to tell Alyosha what he thinks, his thesis (he accepts God but refuses his world).

All of “Rebellion.” Annotate the key points Ivan makes AND pay attention to what Alyosha says in response. Note where his ideas intersect with Zosima’s. Be ready to characterize his thought process in this chapter—how does he go about trying to prove his point? What examples does he include? What does he ignore? How is his approach and how are his ideas directly related to his life experience?

You can stop after this chapter and pick up with “The Grand Inquisitor” for our Friday meeting.

Alyosha remembers Zosima’s final message in the monastery, which emphasizes:

• that monks are no holier than ordinary people. Their choice to seclude themselves from others inside of a monastery suggests they are actually less holy.

• that each person must be responsible for all people and for humankind. This kind of collective responsibility would make universal love possible.

• each person must take full, honest account of what is in his or her heart and acknowledge his sins without fear.

His message emphasizes the significance of consistent effort and honest accountability in living a faithful life. Real faith doesn’t depend on short cuts—it is tireless and it is mundane.

We don’t get even half a page past Zosima’s message before we see why it will inevitably fail to reach most listeners:

• the growing crowd of monks is almost ecstatic waiting for Zosima’s death because they are expecting something miraculous to happen (given how holy he is).

• news from Madame Khoklakova arrives that Vasenka, the son of one of the women who asked for Zosima’s blessing in Book 2, wrote to his mother announcing he would soon return home, just as Zosima predicted. Everyone retroactively interprets this as a miracle of prophecy, as an act of sorcery.

Miracles and sorcery are inherently more interesting than spiritual honesty and consistent effort. They make better stories, so people are drawn to them. Dostoevsky observes that we seek miracles because they save us the trouble of needing to cultivate our own faith in the face of doubt, reason, and suffering.

Here is what to pay attention to in Book 4:

1. Father Ferapont as Zosima’s opponent. What kind of model of religious faith does Father Ferapont represent? What is the allure of Father Ferapont to the other monks? On page 204, we see that the monk from Obdorsk favors Ferapont over Zosima. Why?

2. What is the significance of Father Paisy’s kindness to Alyosha on pages 205-6?

3. Pay attention to the boys in “He gets involved with schoolboys”—this seems like an out of place chapter given the drama of what is happening in the Karamazov family, but these boys become central to the plot much later. Note that we see Alyosha actually following the teachings of Zosima here—seeing his responsibility to these children he does not know. Also note that he does so imperfectly and at a personal cost (he literally gets bitten).

4. What do you think “lacerations” are in the context of Book 4?

5. Pay attention to Snegiryov on pp 230-1. Dmitry humiliated him publicly in front of his son (who is Ilyusha, the boy who bit Alyosha). Also pay attention to the impact this has on Ilyusha, pp. 244-7.

6. What does Alyosha get wrong in his attempt to give Snegiryov money from Katerina Ivanovna?

In a way, Book 4 encapsulates a key tension of Brothers Karamazov as a whole. On one hand, the book articulates a philosophy of active love as the only pathway to faith in God. On the other, it illustrates over and over again why this philosophy is doomed to fail—people prefer shortcuts that ask less of them and they would rather be compelled to believe by miracles, sorcery, or even devils.

In this way, Book 4 perfectly tees up the next part of the novel, its most famous section, Ivan Karamazov’s rejection of God’s world. Book 4 suggests that the author of Brothers Karamazov very well knew how compelling Ivan’s ideas would be to readers. The rest of the novel represents him giving his readers the freedom to escape the intellectual and spiritual traps that Ivan sets for himself and others. As Zosima suggests, such escape requires work, self-appraisal, and a willingness to confront our demons.

When three Havanese dogs show up to your discussion of Brothers Karamazov and they just happen to fit the characters.

However, we learn in Book 3 that there is another Skywalker Karamazov: Smerdyakov. Thankfully, there can be no canine equivalent. I won’t allow it.

“The Contemplator” (1876) by Ivan Kramskoy, a friend of Dostoevsky. The narrator compares Smerdyakov to this painting.

Key passages from Book 3:

Please note: passages in [brackets] are not really key passages, but are rather important to the plot, so I will put those in as plot summaries.

• [Grigory and Marfa are Fyodor Pavlovich’s longtime servants.]

• the rape of Stinking Lizaveta and the birth of Smerdyakov, p 120-2.

• [Smerdyakov is born the same day that Grigory and Marfa’s only child died in infancy. They raised Smerdyakov]

• [Alyosha is going to see Katerina Ivanovna and runs into Dmitry in their father’s garden. Dmitry tells him that he is staking out the house because Fyodor Pavlovich has left an envelope with 3,000 rubles for Grushenka to try to lure her to him. Dmitry is distraught and is trying to catch Grushenka arriving. He is getting drunker and drunker and tells Alyosha his story about Katerina Ivanovna and Grushenka. Here is what you need to know:

  • Katerina Ivanovna is the daughter of Dmitry’s former lt colonel in the military. When the lt colonel was nearly destroyed due to a financial scandal, Katerina Ivanovna went to Dmitry and asked him for money to save her father’s reputation. Dmitry gave her the money and she bowed down before him. He notes that he could have taken advantage of her, but didn’t. Her father died a few weeks later, and she came into money and repaid Dmitry. She asked him to marry her and they are engaged. Dmitry sent Ivan to her to try to break it off. Ivan fell in love with her during this visit.

  • Dmitry now owes Katerina Ivanovna 3000 rubles because she gave him that amount and asked him to mail it to someone for her. He took the money and went off on a bender with Grushenka, whom he is obsessed with.

  • Alyosha tells Dmitry that Katerina Ivanovna will understand and forgive him, but Dmitry insists that his honor depends on repaying her. Alyosha tells him that he and Ivan will give him the money. Dmitry insists that it must come from their father.]

• Dmitry’s view of beauty and the “insect” nature of the Karamazovs, p. 131

• Smerdyakov’s story, p. 149-151. (Note: learning who Smerdyakov is complicates the novel’s otherwise straightforward title)

• Smerdyakov and Fyodor Pavlovich’s arguments against God, p. 155-9

• Dmitry bursts in and beats up Fyodor Pavlovich; Ivan and Alyosha separate the men p. 168-9

• Ivan tells Alyosha he reserves for himself the right to wish his father dead (that the two vipers will devour one another) and assures him that he will always defend Fyodor Pavlovich p 171-2.

• [Alyosha goes to Katerina Ivanovna and tells her, as Dmitry requested, that Dmitry “bows down to her.” Katerina Ivanovna tells Alyosha that she thinks Dmitry still might love her and that she knows for a fact that Grushenka, who is an angel, will not marry Dmitry because an old flame, an officer, is coming back to town for her. It turns out that Grushenka is actually in the next room listening to this conversation. She pops out.]

• Amazing scene where Grushenka outmaneuvers Katerina Ivanovna, who thinks she has successfully manipulated her as a horrified Alyosha looks on, p. 177-182. Upon hearing about this, Dmitry laughs, p 185.

• Make note of Dmitry’s action to Alyosha on p 187. We don’t know why he does this, and neither does Alyosha. But note it,

• Alyosha reads a love letter from Lise and falls asleep after praying and declaring to God, “Thou art love; Thou will send them all joy!” p. 189-91

Are we responsible for our thoughts? Can thinking be a sin?

This is really the underlying question of Book 3, which starts to elaborate the nature of human cruelty, how easy it is to make arguments against God, and how people make themselves and others miserable, seemingly for sport. Here are some examples of times when the novel has asked if thinking can be sinful or criminal:

• Fyodor Pavlovich forgets he has children.

• Fyodor Pavlovich appears to rape Stinking Lizaveta to prove his point that he can find any woman attractive.

• Father Zosima urges both Mme Khokhlokova and Fyodor Pavlovich to stop lying to themselves.

• Characters who are struggling with faith or do not believe.

• Ivan publishes an article that persuades everyone that he doesn’t even believe. (is he responsible for the impact of his thoughts?)

• Ivan tells a room full of people that if there is no immortality, there is no God, and if there is no God, then the most rational thing a person could do is commit crimes. If there is no God, everything would be permitted, even cannibalism.

  • What does it mean to say this in front of someone who is furious at his father?

• All of the Karamazov brothers see the possibility that Dmitry will murder their father and they all say so out loud. Dmitry says several times he will murder his father. (are they responsible for trying to stop this from happening? to what extent?)

• Dmitry cannot endure that men have the capacity for beauty but submit to lust.

• Alyosha sees himself as a sinner for understanding lust.

• Smerdyakov makes an extended argument, apparently to impress Ivan, that is a bad faith, literal reading of the Gospels and that is itself about whether it is a sin for a believer to renounce his faith if faced with torture.

• Fyodor Pavlovich makes a ridiculous argument saying that most people don’t have time for faith, there are only 24 hours in a day.

• Ivan makes the clearest statement of this problem when he says he will allow himself to wish that Dmitry would kill their father because in reality, he will always step in to protect Fyodor Pavlovich.

• Dmitry laughs at Grushenka’s cruelty toward Katerina Ivanovna.

• Dmitry mysteriously beats his chest and tells Alyosha that he is a scoundrel and disgrace and he could stop it, but he won’t.

The novel does not answer this question yet, but the end of Book 3—Alyosha’s prayer—contextualizes it for us as part of Alyosha’s struggle to understand how to live a moral life in a corrupt world. He sees himself on the first rung of a ladder that Dmitry has climbed, but he does not yet know what that means for his life and his future.

Dmitry makes the argument that being a Karamazov means that he will give in to the Karamazov “insect” nature and live a life of debauchery. He surrenders his freedom and capacity to reject his father’s way of defining what it means to be a Karamazov to justify his actions. When Zosima points out that Ivan does not believe in the immortality of his own soul, he hinted that it’s possible that Ivan’s lack of belief might not be a purely intellectual exercise but might stem from his own struggle with being a Karamazov. The possibility that he won’t be able to escape the curse of the Karamazovs nearly overwhelms Alyosha.

The larger questions here are: is the future the inevitable product of the past? What makes change—in the form of salvation, redemption, escape, etc—possible? How do we navigate our lives in full knowledge that we will suffer and human beings are capable of enormous, sometimes senseless cruelty? How do we maintain our faith when the world seems terrible?

These are Alyosha’s questions as he moves from character to character to hear their stories. At this point, he is the audience of the novel’s other characters, trying to understand how he will live when Zosima dies and he is cast out of the monastery and into the incredibly messy world outside its walls.

Bad readers and bad-faith readings

On the first page of the novel, we meet a particular kind of bad reader: a young woman who commits suicide because she imagines herself to be like Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Although Dostoevsky understood the potentially transformative nature of the act of reading, he was also alert to all the ways our interpretive habits can produce devastating results. In the case of this would-be Ophelia, she erased the boundary between reality and fiction by interpreting herself as though she were a literary character inside a fictional universe. The Brothers Karamazov shows us the seductions of imagining ourselves as part of a fiction and distilling a messy, contradictory world according to abstract theories.

Dmitri and Fyodor Pavlovich are the novel’s most humorous bad readers. Fyodor Pavlovich seems to relish citing literary sources that are shockingly irrelevant to the situation he is in, particularly in the middle of deeply serious conversations. In the chapter “The Confession of an Ardent Heart. In Verse,” Dmitri fully commits to trying to convey his romantic nightmare as poetic and, indeed, as a poem. He appears to be quoting whatever lines of poetry he happens to remember to explain his situation to the ever-patient Alyosha, who calmly watches on as his brother quotes Schiller and starts weeping (awkward, even in the 19th century). What is the point of this performance? He points out that he’s read this poem several times over and asks: “Has it improved me? Never! Because I’m a Karamazov” (130). Here, we see a structural repetition of Mme Khokhlakova’s search for faith in Book 2. Both she and Dmitry seem to go through the motions of seeking guidance. I suspect that the novel would address Dmitry’s way of reading in a way that echoes Zosima’s response to Mme Khokhlakova: the act of reading requires an active effort to understand undertaken without self-deception or congratulations. We are, after all, more like both Fyodor Pavlovich and Dmitry than we would prefer.

When we read this novel, we will want to ask:

what kind of reading is Dostoevsky promoting in The Brothers Karamazov? What are the habits of good readers? What can good readers expect out of the experience of reading this novel? What are the limits of what even a good reading can accomplish? What’s the relationship between our experiences as readers and our experiences in life?

In Book 3, we see a few bad-faith readings of the Bible that will probably look familiar to us from our contemporary vantage point. In the chapter “Controversy,” Smerdyakov cites a story from the Gospels when Jesus casts a demon out of a young boy who was suffering from epilepsy (an interesting choice for Dostoevsky to make). The boy was healed—Jesus succeeded after his disciples had failed. It should be noted that his disciples had successfully healed others in the past, which is why they question him about this case. Here is the passage (Matthew 17:19-20) from the King James Bible:

Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, “Why could we not cast it out?” ²⁰ He said to them, “Because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you.”

Jesus spoke to his disciples in parables to make moral points manifest and more easily understood through analogy. Smerdyakov is interpreting the parable literally to disprove the existence of God. He ends his argument—which we sense he is making to impress Ivan, a habit among the novel’s would-be intellectuals Miusov, Rakitin, and Smerdyakov—by giving himself an out, claiming that even if he is wrong, the Christian ideal of repentance mean that he could just be forgiven.

Always a fan of controversial arguments, Fyodor Pavlovich jumps in to the conversation to offer his own perspective, a mock-utilitarian argument: non-believers lack faith because there are only twenty-four hours in a day, which is not enough time to believe. These two examples are more obvious examples of ways that the Bible can be weaponized against faith, but we might ask how the leap from “there is no immortality” to “everything is permitted, even cannibalism” in Ivan’s thinking might share some of the shaky foundations of these readings. It turns out that there’s plenty of evidence and arguments to affirm a lack of faith. The novel doesn’t try to convince us of anything, but it does make us aware of how easy it is to be wrong.

As human beings, we are never living in anything like a novel: if you have a narrator, foreshadowing, symbolism, an ending, a moral, or a clear antagonist in your life, you should seek help immediately. Novels can offer us incredible insight into human psychology, ourselves, and other people (for this reason, I offer a piece of free advice: avoid therapists who do not read). They give us practice in the critical work of seeking meaning from experience and evaluating ourselves, others, and events using information that is rarely sufficient.

Reading can give us insight into the causes of human misery, how to maintain hope at our lowest moments, how we can live in ethical relation to others, and how our minds can save us or destroy us. However, novels cannot be applied like a blueprint to our lives, because our lives will never be as simple as a novel and the world is populated by millions of people whose experiences we will never know. And like Alyosha, we will eventually have to close our books and walk beyond the walls where we feel safe in what we know.

Book 2: Overview

Setting:

the monastery outside of town. Note: the town in this novel is fictional. The time of narration of the novel is the late 1870s and this is a story from 13 years earlier, so we are in the 1860s.

Who is in Book 2: (for your character map)

• All of the Karamazovs.

• Pyotor Aleksandrovich Miusov (Dmitry’s relative), a pompous, attention-seeking man who would have been typical of the “Men of the Forties,” an older generation of liberal intellectuals who were the target of massive critique and backlash by the younger generation of intellectuals with more revolutionary agendas for radical social reform. (the “Men of the Sixties”—we are in the 1860s)

  • with a young man who is a distant relative of his, Kalganov, who is Alyosha’s friend. P 43

• Maksimov (a local landowner. Note that Fyodor Pavolich calls him “von Sohn,” referring to a scandalous murder trial that had just happened where von Sohn was murdered in an apartment with several young prostitutes by a man named Maksimov)

• Father Zosima

• Others who live at the monastery:

  • father superior (hosting the dinner)

  • Father Paisy (p 48)

  • Rakitin: 22 year-old seminary student and future theologian.

  • Iosif. Monk, librarian.

• Madame Khokhlahova p. 57

  • and her daughter Lise

Key passages:

• Father Zosima’s conversation with Mme Khoklakova, p 67-70.

• Discussion of Ivan’s article on the ecclesiastical courts. p. 74-80.

• Ivan’s philosophy introduced by Miusov, p 83-85

• Zosima bows before Dmitry, p. 89

• Zosima tells Alyosha that after he dies, Alyosha must leave the monastery, p.92-3

• Rakitin predicts there will be a crime and gets Alyosha to admit he sees the truth in this p. 94-5

• Explanation for why Fyodor Pavlovich returns to cause a scandal at the dinner p.103

Active love vs. “Everything would be permitted”

Book 2 is one of the more challenging books in the novel because it packs in a lot of partial information and introduces key themes in an understated way, almost as an overture would. Most significantly, Book 2 introduces the major conceptual debate that lies at the novel’s heart between Zosima’s philosophy of active love, which he relates to Madame Khokhlakov, and Ivan’s central argument against the existence of God and the inherent morality of human beings.

Let’s look at the way Book 2 introduces both ideas briefly.

Active love

Father Zosima introduces active love to Madame Khkokhlakov, who tells him that she suffers from a lack of faith because she cannot believe in an idea of a “future life beyond the grave” (66). Note that her argument here anticipates Ivan’s. When she asks Zosima how she can regain her faith, he tells her that “there is no way to prove” the existence of God, but “one can be convinced” through:

the experience of active love. Strive intently to love your neighbor actively and tirelessly. The more you succeed in loving, the more you will become convinced of the existence of God and the immortality of your own soul.

He does not offer a counterargument that can persuade Madame Khokhlakov of the existence of God—he offers her a pathway to assert her freedom by actively loving other people in a way that “demands work and endurance” (70). Here, we see the foundation of Zosima’s philosophy rests in his faith in the individual human conscience. There is no generalization that will suffice to persuade a nonbeliever to faith, but each non-believer can discover God within her own conscience through an experience of freely choosing to actively love other people.

Zosima clarifies the idea of active love in three ways for now:

1. Active love is not the same as generally loving humanity as an idea; in fact, these are opposite ideas. Active love requires us to love our annoying neighbors, even if they smell bad and are ungrateful. It depends on concrete action in the world of people.

2. Action that is motivated by a desire for praise and recognition is not active love.

3. Active love as a pathway to faith depends on our ability to transcend self-deception. We must hold ourselves accountable to the truth and be vigilant about all of the lies we might tell ourselves about the morality of our actions.

It is worth noting that although Zosima’s speech moves Mme Khokhlakov to tears, there is little reason for any reader to expect her to go recalibrate her entire existence around the idea of active love. In fact, Zosima moves right into making a joke to Lise, Mme Khokhlakov’s daughter, in a way that is consistent with what he has just said—there is nothing he can say that will do the work for Mme Khokhlakov so that she can put her unbelief to rest.

This is the only time active love is explained as an idea in the novel. It will recur throughout in parable form as stories, which underscores its dependence on concrete action and context and its failure to function as an abstract idea.

“Everything would be permitted”

Ivan’s ideas will be familiar to readers of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Demons. They are familiar to us because they also closely anticipate some of Nietzsche’s core ideas about the Ubermensch, the will to power, and the death of God. Nietzsche read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground (and possibly The Idiot). In a nutshell, Ivan’s argument is as follows: “if there is no God or immortality of the soul, then there is nothing that compels humanity to moral action, and everything is permitted (see 83-4).

It is worth noting that Zosima and Ivan’s positions align in some key ways, but the essential difference between them is that Zosima’s position depends on his belief in the power of the individual human conscience to act as an engine for human beings to freely choose to act in moral ways, and Ivan is stuck inside his own argument that limits humanity’s choices to God or cannibalism because he cannot believe with certainty either that God exists or doesn’t. We can recognize perhaps here why Ivan’s worldview might find comfort in the image of an authoritarian Church that absorbs the State that he proposes in his article about ecclesiastical courts. The way this plays out in their philosophies, as Zosima notes, is that he believes that “people are made for happiness” (67), whereas Ivan believes that people are fundamentally cruel.

The novel will return to this, and so will we. For now, let’s pay attention to a few key contextual details from the introduction of Ivan’s philosophy:

1. Miusov—a character whose desire to be self-important and admired motivates most of what he says—narrates Ivan’s ideas. We therefore hardly expect this to be the most forceful statement of Ivan’s position. We also know that Ivan elaborated his ideas to an audience of mostly women five days earlier. We encounter an essentially abstract philosophical argument secondhand in social contexts that matter. Ivan’s ideas give Miusov fodder he can try to use to impress people, and we wonder what afterlife they might have with the others who heard him.

2. The scene immediately amplifies its concern for the impact of Ivan’s ideas in circulation by having Dmitry jump in and express interest in the idea that “crime not only must be permitted, but must even be acknowledged as the most necessary and logical outcome of every atheist’s position” (84). We can easily imagine the convenience of this idea for someone in Dmitry’s position.

3. Zosima, who has already responded to these ideas in the scene with Mme Khokhlakov, correctly reads Ivan’s anguish. He points out that Ivan doesn’t believe the article he wrote or “the immortality of your soul.” It’s easy to gloss over Dostoevsky’s psychological insight here into Ivan’s failure to believe that his own soul can be immortal. We also see Zosima recognize that Ivan is tormented precisely because he can’t resolve the question of God’s existence and never will. Zosima gives thanks to the “Creator for giving [Ivan] a noble heart that is capable of experiencing such suffering” (85). Zosima and Alyosha uniquely observe that Ivan is not an atheist and would be happier if he were. They also correctly observe the psychological and emotional states that give rise to Ivan’s thinking.

We are only in Book 2, and we are seeing the insufficiency of the schematic that associates Ivan primarily with the mind, Dmitry with the body and heart, and Alyosha with the soul.

The Karamazovs are a Mess

Rakitin is an insufferable gossip, so you might have missed just how much information he managed to convey to Alyosha in their conversation. It is easy to miss the details, so here is my drawing of what we learned. The novel will tell us all of this again later.

The title of this drawing is “Actually, the scene at the Monastery Could Have Been Much, Much Worse”

To be continued…

Alice Neel, Untitled, 1938 (the Karamazov family and Grigory). Published in The Paris Review, February 2015.

Book 1 in a nutshell:

1. We learn two important pieces of information: first, this is the first time all three brothers and their father have been in the same place at the same time, and second, this is the story of Fyodor Pavlovich’s tragic death.

2. Nothing happens—the whole book gives you background on each of the Karamazovs as individuals and in relation to one another.

   Make a character list for yourself to keep in your copy of the novel. Focus primarily on the father and three brothers.

“From the Author”

• This note should be considered part of the novel, not an external note from Dostoevsky to us.

• There is no evidence that Dostoevsky planned to write a second installment of this novel, so why would this note tell us to read this as a prequel to some other novel?

  • He is proposing that this is the story of Alyosha as a hero while also telling us not to expect much in the way of heroic action from Alyosha in this novel, which is focused on his formation through struggle and conflict. At this point, he is a tentative young man who wants to do the right thing and live a good life while feeling deeply confused about how to do that.

  • These comments begin to make visible Dostoevsky’s unique take on novels as records of human personalities and actions:

    • Human actions make sense within a larger trajectory of growth and change across a lifetime because

    • Human beings are not static and cannot be reduced to a single gesture, characteristic, or idea, which means

    • Human beings possess incredible freedom and must choose to embrace that freedom on a daily basis, so

    • Stories are the ideal form to capture human life because they are a medium that depends on change, where human choices are cast against a backdrop of causality, other people’s choices, and chance.

• This note almost taunts readers and dares them to not read the novel, which is a peculiar way to address readers. This address suggests that we as readers are not invisible to the novel. The novel is aware of us and challenges us to participate in the act of seeking meaning.

  • In Dostoevsky’s literary universe, readers have freedom. There is no godlike author prodding us along, foreshadowing a secure future, helping us to arrive at conclusions. The novel is deeply invested in how individual human beings think as a moral, ethical activity. We see this investment in the novel’s depictions of characters as thinking beings and in its way of engaging us as readers.

  • Ideally, we will leave this novel as better readers than we are right now.

The Brothers Karamazov pretends to be a normal novel, briefly

First, a note about the Karamazov brothers that might offer a helpful mnemonic as we are getting to know them.

If we were to put on our English major hats, we might notice there are three brothers and think about the cultural and literary significance of the number 3. 3 might be the favorite number of stories: three little pigs, three wishes, Goldilocks and the three bears. 3 might be seen as a divine number associated with the Holy Trinity.

Many readers have treated the brothers as a trinity of sorts, with each one representing some part of humanity, as follows:

DMITRI represents the BODY and the SENSES, sensuality.

IVAN represents the human MIND and INTELLECT.

Alyosha represents the human SOUL.

Go ahead and read them this way if it helps to distinguish them at first. It is true enough at the start of the novel as a paradigm.

Warning: the novel will blow up the paradigm faster than we think possible. Many readers don’t notice that. But, we will.

Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his sons

It is easy to assume that most people want basically the same things: we want to be happy, we want security, peace, respect, autonomy, and purpose. This theory of human nature seems pretty unshakeable until we open social media, attend a meeting, or get ready to share a holiday meal with extended family during an election season.

Dostoevsky’s works show us the insufficiency of simple assumptions about the human mind. In the Author’s Note, he suggests that perhaps the strangest, most eccentric person “sometimes carries within himself the very heart of the whole situation.” In other words, if we want to understand something about human nature, we might avoid trying to treat human beings like a set where we could determine the mean or the average. We would be better off doing a deep dive investigation of a single eccentric mind.

Fyodor Pavlovich is one of Dostoevsky’s fascinating case studies of contradictory, paradoxical, maddening human beings in action. The first sentence of the novel lets us know that this story is about his demise. By the time we get to the end of Book 1, we can easily imagine someone wanting to murder him.

Fyodor Pavlovich is incredibly self-serving, yet he seems to relish public humiliation. He is a sensualist, committed to drinking, debauchery, and women. He is cruel yet entertaining. He’s a sponger who died with a fortune. He is happy to accommodate his wives’ desire to marry as a statement of protest or a grand gesture—it is all the same to him.

His first wife, Adelaida Ivanovna Miusova, married Fyodor Pavlovich to make a statement of some kind. To prepare us to understand this marriage, the narrator tells us about a young woman who committed suicide because she was determined to imitate Shakespeare’s Ophelia, Hamlet’s lover who famously went mad. Ophelia’s suicide was described in disturbingly beautiful, poetic terms by Hamlet’s mother. There is a tradition in the visual arts of rendering Ophelia’s dead body as beautiful and poetic.

Ophelia, Sir John Everett Millais, 1851-2. Tate Museum, London.

This is a small detail that introduces a significant idea for The Brothers Karamazov: human beings often see themselves as characters in a story and are susceptible to making foolish, destructive choices to fulfill the dramatic role they imagine they are playing. Many people would rather live in a story than in the world.

This is one of many ways that we deceive ourselves. The Brothers Karamazov tells us that we are not living in a Shakespeare play or a novel. Philosophical concepts and literary types are far too simple to accommodate the messiness of a single human life inside of time passing. The Brothers Karamazov is a novel that is boldly trying to accommodate the mess and to tell its story.

Fyodor Pavlovich plays roles as well as anyone, although we can tell early on that he is hardly committed to any of them. His unique talent as a parent seems to be forgetting that he has children. This characteristic comes up more than once in the opening book for a reason: morality and memory are closely linked in Dostoevsky’s universe. As the novel suggests—and perhaps, as our experience of the world today might confirm—forgetting the needs of children for whom we are responsible is a form of evil that has lasting consequences.

One point to keep in mind here is that Dostoevsky is setting up a novel where everyday acts of forgetting are part of the machinery of evil. He is creating a complex novel without a single hero, where the actions and ideas of a parent have lasting consequences for their children and where no character is simply the sum of their own experiences.

We are getting to know his characters the way we might get to know other people in the world if we had the time. We are learning the origins of the brothers, their personalities, their activities, and their conflicts. Each brother will get an entire Book telling us more (Dmitri: Book 3, Ivan: Book 5, Alyosha: Book 7).

The structure of the novel invites us to become better readers of other people and of complex human situations. The first seven books of the novel offer us a kind of training in understanding human beings; the novel’s second half will offer a test of our capacity to navigate the ambiguity and uncertainty that are essential to being in a world with other people.

As you read, ask yourself:

1. how has Fyodor Pavlovich influenced each of his sons?

2. what dimensions of Fyodor Pavlovich’s personality feel recognizable to you in the twenty-first century? Do you know anyone like him?

3. How does the novel explain the radical differences in Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov, even though they have the same parents?

4. What do you notice about Dostoevsky’s approach to conveying character to us? What is your own process of getting to know these characters like?

Contexts/glosses:

Dostoevsky and Anti-Semitism: I recommend this article about Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism in the last decade of his life by Gary Saul Morson. It does not deny, as most Dostoevsky scholars did for many years, the very real antipathy toward Jews in this novel. It also does not dismiss his anti-Semitic language and statements by making claims about historical relativism pointing to anti-Semitism as a common position in the 1870s in Russia. He includes some of Dostoevsky’s most anti-Semitic positions published elsewhere in his last decade and reads them, among other things, in light of Dostoevsky’s increasingly apocalyptic thinking. He concludes by asking what we can learn from the example of Dostoevsky about racial bias and hatred.

p. 22: the ecclesiastical courts. The 1860s and 1870s were a period of major judicial reform in Russia—in 1864, a Westernized system of courts was established. This prompted debate over whether ecclesiastical courts, which oversaw matters within the Russian Orthodox Church, should be the one and only true judicial system in Russia, replacing human judgment with divine judgment.

The main point of Ivan’s article is not the debate—it is that he can write compellingly about a position he doesn't even believe and do it so well that everyone who reads it thinks it agrees with their positions.

p. 27: “holy fool.” A major motif in Russian literature, holy fools are characters who seemed to renounce worldly wisdom and were therefore closer to God. Different authors had their own perspectives on what constituted a holy fool—some appeared to be mentally ill, some seemed to function like jester-type figures. None of them conformed to social standards.

Dostoevsky pointing out that Alyosha was almost a type of holy fool may be a reference to Prince Myshkin, the holy fool who was the hero of his novel The Idiot. The Idiot might be seen as Dostoevsky’s failed attempt to imagine a Christ-type figure exert a powerful influence on those around him. Myshkin was simple-minded, devout, pure, and ended up being easily manipulated and overpowered by most of the other characters in the novel.

The Brothers Karamazov shows Dostoevsky’s evolving understanding of the place of holiness in the human heart and within a complex human existence. Alyosha toys with the idea of purity—he’d prefer to stay within the safety of the monastery, away from the conflicts and temptations of the world of other people.

Problem #1: There are 500 characters and they all seem to be named Russian Russianovich Russianskii.

How Russian names work

Strategy: Character Map

Take a blank sheet of paper, write out a character map for yourself, fold it, and keep it in your book.

Here is what my character map looks like:

The following characters should be on your map:

The Karamazovs:

(Note: the root of “Karamazov” in Russian means “stain”)

Fyodor Pavlovich, the father

Dmitri Fyodorovich (Mitya; son of Adelaida Ivanovna Miusov; his uncle is Pyotr Ivanov Miusov) Body

Ivan Fyodorovich (Vanya; son of Sofya Ivanovna) Mind

Alexei Fyodorovich (Alyosha; son of Sofya Ivanovna) Soul

Servants of the Karamazovs:

Grigory

Marfa

Smerdyakov (son of Stinking Lizaveta; his name basically means “Stinky”)

The Monastery

Father Zosima: Alyosha’s elder

Father Paissy

Father Ferapont: Zosima’s rival; sees devils

Rakitin: seminary student/apprentice

Women in town connected in important ways to the Karamazovs:

Mme Khokhlakov: visits monastery in Book 2.

Liza/Lise: Mme Khokhlakov’s daughter; has been in love with Alyosha since childhood

Grushenka (Agrafena Alexandrovna Svetlov; almost always called “Grushenka”): Dmitri wants to marry her. Fyodor Pavlovich is wooing her.

Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtsev (Katya): Engaged to Dmitri. in love with Ivan?

The Boys

Kolya: boy whom Alyosha is trying to mentor

Ilyusha: son of Captain Snegirov, whom Dmitri humiliates and beats. Was throwing rocks at the other boys. Is very sick.

Zhuchka: Ilyusa’s dog

Strategy: Ignore non-main characters/don’t worry about keeping track of them

Don’t worry about other characters, especially in Books 8 and 9.

Strategy: Annotate to help yourself find things later

While reading, circle the name of a character when he or she is introduced or something important is revealed about that character.

I also write the character name on the top of the page so I can find it later if I need it.

Problem #2: Dostoevsky needed an editor

I would argue that The Brothers Karamazov’s way of making meaning requires 900 pages. The book is not too long—he was not an author selling by the word and rewarded for being longwinded.

However, his way of composing created a few real challenges for readers that an editor could have helped him fix.

Dostoevsky did not plot out his stories before he wrote. So, he did not know how the book was going to end or even where it was going next. He focused his creative, generative energy on creating characters who were fully realized and who were so true to life that it was almost as if they were independent people with wills of their own. His characters know themselves as well as we will ever know them. We will talk more about this later.

In the place of plot and events, Dostoevsky creates crowd scenes—parties, trials, gatherings—that bring together these personalities he has created to see what happens and how his characters would respond to one another. And he watched.

Notice how this works in the novel, how it depends on groups of people convening. Scandals happen, secrets are revealed, surprising alliances are formed.

This creates a few challenges:

1. We lose sight of who is in the room and who is talking. When someone starts talking, underline or mark their name in some way, because some characters are big talkers and might be talking for 10 pages.

2. Events are not narrated by an omniscient narrator. Our narrator is a townsperson who seems to have a very uneven knowledge of what is going on.

3. We see dramatic revelations in the things people say more than we see dramatic actions for most of the book.

4. No character has meaning in isolation. All of them exist in tension with one another, with their histories with one another.

As you read, ask yourself: what am I learning about this character, and how? How does this align with or change what I already know? What characters in the room best understand the motives of this character?

Dostoevsky also wrote massive paragraphs. When you see lots of long paragraphs, skim and pay attention to:

1. Who is talking.

2. what names are mentioned.

3. where a piece of information is revealed.

4. when the speaker changes topic.

5. why they are speaking in the first place.

Fyodor Pavlovich, the father, for example, loves to make a scene and to hear himself talk. He loves to hold court. You do not need to hang on his every word. Dmitri, the eldest, courts drama and loves to share drama. Ivan, the middle son, loves to expound theories, whether he believes them or not. He knows he is the smartest person in the room.

Knowing what kind of speaker you are dealing with will help you skim through some of what they are talking about.

Final tip: don’t put the book down mid-chapter.

Challenge #3: The book is really long

Tip #1: Understand the book’s structure

Use the table of contents so you can see the logic of the book’s organization, which is as follows:

Book 1: We meet the Karamazovs, who are all in the same place for the first time ever. We know from the first sentence of the book that Fyodor Pavlovich is going to die.

Book 2: We go to the monastery, where we see the conflict that is driving the novel: Dmitri thinks Fyodor Pavlovich has stolen the money his mother left for him, and Fyodor Pavlovich said he owes him nothing and in fact, Dmitri owes him money.

[from this point forward, much of the plot of this book is dictated by the wanderings of Alyosha—he is going to visit different characters and listen to them]

Book 3: Alyosha goes to Dmitri and listens to his story, especially the complicated story of his love life: he is engaged to Katerina Ivanovna and can’t break it off with her because he owes her 3,000 rubles. He is in love with Grushenka and wants to run off with her. Fyodor Pavlovich, seemingly for sport, is trying to seduce Grushenka by leaving an envelope of money for her at his house.

Book 4: Alyosha is back at the monastery, where we learn of a conflict between Father Ferapont, who believes people are evil and who sees devils everywhere, and Father Zosima, who believes in active love.

Book 5: Alyosha goes to Ivan and hears his story “The Grand Inquisitor,” the most famous chapter in the novel. Ivan explains why he refuses God’s world and tells a story about Christ returning during the Inquisition and being put in jail, where he is told that he overestimated people by giving them free will.

Book 6: We get the life story of Father Zosima as told to Alyosha, from his reckless youth through his growth and spiritual evolution. This book is an argument against Book 5.

Book 7: This is Alyosha’s book, where his faith is tested and then strengthened. Alyosha has been asking himself how to live a holy, meaningful life. He has learned from Zosima that while it is tempting to lock yourself in a monastery away from the world to avoid temptation, true goodness requires us to live in the world among other people.

This is the end of the conceptual foundation of the novel. At this point, we should understand the hearts and minds of the characters and the tensions between their ideas.

Books 8-12 show us the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich and the trial that follows.

We go through the events of the murder no fewer than 4 times: it is narrated, it is investigated, it is presented at trial.

The plot raises the questions: how can we judge another person? how can we determine guilt? if there are no direct witnesses to a crime, how can we understand what happened?

These questions raise larger questions about the nature of guilt and responsibility as well as freedom, suffering, and redemption.

Within this plot, an important subplot emerges: Alyosha sees a group of young boys who are fighting and sees that if he does not step in to try to love and mentor them, their future could be tragic.

Tip #2: Skim some parts and if you need to outright skip some parts, the world won’t end.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky published his final (and greatest) novel, The Brothers Karamazov, in 1880, three months before he died. It synthesizes philosophical, psychological, and artistic ideas he had been pursuing throughout his career in works such as Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and Demons. In it, we can see Dostoevsky:

• looking back at the turbulence of 19th-century Russia, a period characterized by on-going military conflicts; revolt and uprisings against autocracy and serfdom that were heavily influenced by European political philosophies; massive social upheaval, including the 1861 abolition of serfdom.

• looking around at his contemporary moment with concern for rising secularism, atheism, and nihilism of Russia’s educated classes; the expanding Western influence on Russian thought, politics, and culture; and increasing violence of Russia’s revolutionary movements, one of which assassinated Tsar Alexander II a month after Dostoevsky died. Dostoevsky would register all of this in spiritual terms as a crisis of the Russian soul.

• looking ahead at the fate of Russia and the Russian people separated from faith, God, and aspects of Russian culture free from Western influence. More than any other 19th-century thinker, Dostoevsky foretold with uncanny accuracy the rise of terrorism, tyranny, and violence on an unprecedented scale in the twentieth century.

Major relevant events from Dostoevsky’s biography

• Dostoevsky’s mother died of tuberculosis when he was 16 and his father was murdered by his serfs when he was 18. The absence of parents is a major theme throughout his works.

• Because Dostoevsky created fully realized characters who articulated incredibly compelling statements of atheism, people sometimes overlook the fact that he was a deeply Christian thinker for most of his life. He was raised in the Russian Orthodox Church and although he drifted away from his faith for a brief period in his youth (see the next entry), he remained committed to an essentially Christian vision until his death.

• Dostoevsky was part of a utopian socialist intellectual group called the Petrashevsky Circle in the 1840s. In 1849, several members of this circle, including Dostoevsky, were arrested and sentenced to death. At the moment of his execution, his sentence was commuted to five years of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp. He was forever changed by this moment and wrote about it in The Idiot.

• Dostoevsky suffered from epilepsy after this traumatic event and wrote in such detail about his seizures, his writing has appeared in medical textbooks.

• He was obsessed with gambling. In fact, he wrote a novella called The Gambler to pay off his gambling debts and once gambled away his and his wife’s clothes to play roulette.

Joseph Frank’s five-volume biography of Dostoevsky is one of the best literary biographies ever written. It is also available as an abridged single volume.

Fun facts about The Brothers Karamazov:

• Dostoevsky read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina as he was in the early stages of working on The Brothers Karamazov. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky lived in the same city and managed to never meet. They considered themselves rivals, but Dostoevsky considered Anna Karenina the finest book ever written. Likewise, Tolstoy embraced and cherished The Brothers Karamazov after Dostoevsky’s death.

  • Although the novels feel worlds apart, they share several major concerns, including: self-deception as a corrosive force, seeing as an activity that is not neutral, and meaning existing in the local, the everyday, and the prosaic. Parts of The Brothers Karamazov feel like a response to Tolstoy.

• Dostoevsky tried—and failed—to write a book like The Brothers Karamazov earlier in his career. The premise of the novel he wanted to write was that a Christ figure would come to Russia and redeem nineteenth-century Russians. The problem? His Christ character ended up getting bullied by all the other characters. Dostoevsky’s writing notebooks show his frustration with his character’s failure. The failed novel was The Idiot and was published in 1869.

• In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, a character remarks: “There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life... it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore.”

Let’s check with Orlando Bloom to see what happens when we try to go it alone:

Preliminary logistics for our adventure together

The translation

First things first: please get the newest translation of The Brothers Karamazov by Michael Katz.

I ask you to get this edition even if you have another translation because:

1. you will almost certainly enjoy reading this one more than any of the others. I have read them all and pick this one.

2. it is objectively better than the other English translations in its compromise between capturing the idiosyncratic nature of Dostoevsky’s Russian and readability in English.

3. We will spend so long on it, we might as well have the same version.

The plan

Meeting time: Fridays at 3 pm, starting May 2nd.

Meeting place: TBA.

Our approach to reading

Keep in mind:

• this is flexible and can be changed as needed.

• You are likely to re-read this novel someday. Here is what that means for this reading of it:

  • you aren’t meant to read this entire novel at a steady pace—some parts warrant slower reading, some parts warrant skimming. I will signal to you what those are as we go until you develop your own feel for it. You can relish every page some other time (or never).

  • when you fall behind (not if), please don’t go back and try to catch up. Read a plot summary and join us where we are. My favorite online reading resource is Shmoop—it is accurate, it is written in bullet points, and it even has a sense of humor. The reading police won’t come get you. You can read anything you miss some other day. Keep moving forward!

• Lift the novel with your legs, not your back.

Preliminary reading schedule

(updated May 10)

Please try to read the parts listed below by the dates listed below. If you fall behind, read a plot summary and join us where we are! I will have notes for you to use if you’d like available before and after our sessions.

May 12th: Read through page 72, the end of the chapter “A Lady of Little Faith.”

Focus on getting to know Fyodor Pavlovich, the three brothers, and Father Zosima. Pay particular attention to Zosima’s explanation of “active love” in the last chapter of this reading.

May 21st: Read through page page 159, the end of the chapter “Smerdyakov.”

Your main focus here will be on **drama**: the big scene the Karamazovs cause at the monastery in Book 2, and Dmitri’s recounting of the romantic backstory behind this big mess to Alyosha in Book 3. We will also meet the village sociopath, Smerdyakov.

TBD: Read through page 254, the end of the chapter “And in the Fresh Air.”

Alyosha is running all over the place in this book, meeting most of the novel’s other characters. We will meet new characters in “He Gets Involved With Schoolboys”—Kolya and Ilyusha will be very important much later in the novel, so make a mental note of them and add them to your character list.

This book will start to raise the questions “what is the nature of evil, and how do we recognize it in everyday life? how can we try to live a good life in the presence of evil? how can we manage our impulses and make sense of the needs of our body in a world that seems filled with temptation?” through Alyosha’s experiences as he dreads Father Zosima’s impending death and tries to figure out how to live outside of the monastery’s walls.

TBD (WEDNESDAY): Read through page 334, the end of “It’s Always Interesting to Talk to a Clever Man”

This is the most famous part of the novel, particularly the chapters “Rebellion” and “The Grand Inquisitor.” This part of the novel is taken out as an excerpt and read by itself all the time. It is telling that the best-known part of the novel is “written” by Ivan Karamazov. What are the strengths of Ivan’s arguments? What impact do these arguments have on Alyosha?

I am going to ask us to read Ivan’s arguments from two angles: first, as a philosophical treatise of sorts, which is how Ivan means it; second, as part of a novel, where we are alert to Ivan as an embodied character with a history who is at a particular moment in his life story.

TBD: Read through page 426, the end of the chapter “Cana of Galilee”

Book 6 is the novel’s counterargument to Book 5. Instead of a philosophical treatise about evil and human suffering, we get the life story of Father Zosima. How do these stories respond to Ivan’s points in Books 5? Book 7 captures the suffering and epiphany of Alyosha through Dostoevsky’s version of Christian parables. At the end of Book 7, we can imagine Dostoevsky’s interest in the Cana of Galilee story from the Gospels: Christ’s first miracle was not a grandiose, impressive gesture, but rather the act of turning water to wine at a simple wedding.

This is the end of the first part of the novel, which we might consider its thesis.

Now we begin the second part of the novel, which is its plot, which tests its thesis.

TBD (WEDNESDAY): Read through page 518, through the end of “Delirium.”

Please note: this part is heavy on plot suddenly, and there are lots of characters introduced whom you don’t really need to track. Please use my summary. You may also check out my really badly drawn map of all of the places where Dmitri runs in this book.

June 20: Read through page 654, through the end of “Ilyusha.” Use my plot notes.

June 27: Finish the novel. Focus on Book 11 and the Epilogue. (don’t skip the epilogue, even if you don’t read the other parts!). Use the plot notes for the Trial in Book 12.