Dostoevsky, the Brothers Karamazov, and Russian Cultural Movements of the Mid-19th Century

It would be nearly impossible to overstate the literary and social-philosophical significance of Fyodor Dostoevsky's works for Russian culture, as well as others all over the world. His writing inspired, provoked, and shaped the endeavors of countless modern thinkers and artists, and even in his lifetime he became, as Joseph Frank has written, "a living symbol of all the suffering that history had imposed on the Russian people" (3). For the Russia of his day, he came to be an icon, a prophet, and a spiritual guide in times of great crisis, earning a degree of admiration even from his most outspoken political opponents. Indeed, the evolution of Dostoevsky's life and writings in many ways "embodies and expresses all the conflicts and contradictions that made up the panorama of Russian social-cultural life," culminating in his final masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov (Frank 4).

Dostoevsky got his start in the Russian literary scene of the 1840's, partially under the guidance and inspiration of Belinsky and other prominent members of a new generation of Russian intelligentsia. The release of his first novel, Poor Folk, initially distinguished him among the "Natural School" of writers, who, working within the space of a budding Russian literary realism, sought to devote their artistic attentions to contemporary social and political issues facing the country (Frank 5-6). As quickly as Dostoevsky had won their praise with the "obvious social pathos" of Poor Folk, however, he began taking a great deal of criticism as he experimented with alternative literary modes, exploring deeper social issues more subtly through their personal impacts on individual characters (Frank 6). His early exercises in "the poetics of subjectivity" - expressing the thoughts and feelings of characters directly, through monologue and dialogue rather than flat exposition - also exemplified a growing obsession with the freedom and free-will of the individual, which became a preeminent and unifying theme of his later, more influential works (Frank 5-6).

Early in his career, Dostoevsky was also a faithful attendee of Petrashevsky circle meetings, where he obtained "a thorough schooling in Socialist thought," but found his belief in the fundamental human need for individuality deeply at odds with the inhibitions of human nature described in popular Utopian Socialist ideals (Frank 7). Even so, his passionate hatred of serfdom drove his participation; he even went so far as to join Nikolay Speshnev's underground radical movement to incite revolution among the serfs, a fact which Joseph Frank asserts became the basis for the "profound understanding of the psychology of characters attracted to radical ideas" shown in his work (Frank 7). But it was his sudden arrest, "mock execution" and exile by Nicholas I's secret police that Frank calls "perhaps the defining moment" in Dostoevsky's life and literary career, and the beginning of greater insights into the religious-metaphysical that would shape his most important novels, especially The Brothers Karamazov (Frank 7-8).

He had believed, as many of his contemporaries did, that the privileged students and scholars of the intelligentsia could lead the peasants in a triumphant social revolution. During his subsequent imprisonment in Siberia, however, he experienced the prodigious gap between the classes firsthand, and his belief in the value of "the freedom of the will" crystallized into what he came to realize was "a primordial need of the human personality" (Frank 8). These revelations made Dostoevsky's reentry into the dramatically changing culture of Russia's intellectual elite a conflicted one. On his return in 1860, he found himself at odds with a new breed of social-political radicals, led by Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, whose philosophical roots lie in the atheism, materialism, and Utilitarianism of post-revolutionary European ideologies (Frank 9).

In spite of his own strong background in French philosophy, Dostoevsky believed Russia's social problems could only be solved from within, a conviction that was reinforced by Alexander II's peaceful abolishment of serfdom in 1861 (Frank 10) Moreover, he was repulsed by Chernyshevsky's popular doctrine of "rational egoism;" the very notion that "all the needs and desires of the human personality could be satisfied by reason was for him the most short-sighted naïveté," and he viewed the use of egoism as a center for morality as self-defeating and inherently dangerous (Frank 10). To Dostoevsky, whose great faith in the peasantry's innate Christian virtues of self-sacrifice and love fueled his artistic and social-political impulses, the agitation of the working class and attacks on state apparatus seemed counterintuitive (Frank 10-11). Thus his rejection of this brand of radicalism echoed loudly in the confrontational polemics of his writings in the 1860's; however, it was yet another paradigm shift in Russian radical thought - that of the 1870's, following his return from Europe - that signaled his final rise to the status of prophet and icon of Russia's conflicted social consciousness (Frank 12-13).

Throughout the 1860's, Dostoevsky openly challenged the social-philosophical views of Russian Nihilists, which he saw as "an artificial transplantation of all the ideological maladies undermining Western civilization;" and, with texts like The Devils and Crime and Punishment, he probed the disturbing and ruinous consequences he believed such a transplant might have on the human condition (Frank 65). But he returned from travels abroad to find, once again, that the philosophical climate among the intelligentsia had changed. A new wave of young intellectuals had given popular roots to the ideology of narodnichestvo, Russian Populism, which was much more spiritually akin to convictions he had held since as far back as his exile (Frank 65). The bold and ruthless tactics of Nihilist revolutionaries like Nachaev and his collaborators entered into public discourse during a murder investigation and trial in 1871, which simultaneously spread desires to live and work with the common people and stirred popular outrage with their flagrant disregard of morality (Frank 66-67). The result was a kind of "radical self-awareness" among the younger generation of intelligentsia, who "went to the people" with a new enthusiasm for the Christian love and self-sacrifice Dostoevsky had always idealized (Frank 70). And, though they found little more than apathy and suspicion among the peasants, Dostoevsky was moved by their moral devotion and revaluation of Christian ethics (Frank 80).

But this new Socialist Populism, despite its basis in Christian moral and social ideals, was still motivated by reason rather than the religious faith Dostoevsky considered crucial to bridging the gaps between classes and lifting the Russian people out of their historical suffering (Frank 85-86). Dostoevsky's ideological and moral conflicts with his contemporaries over issues of religious faith would never fully be reconciled, but they added new dimensions of complexity to his final writings. Narodnichestvo was to him still a sort of atheism, and so still spiritually destructive and socially dangerous. Its proponents, in eagerly seeking enlightenment in "the Russian people's truth," were receptive to Christian morality as never before; this was incomplete, in Dostoevsky's mind, without accepting the "root of...the people's inherited belief in Christ as the divine God-man," but from the resulting dialogues, Dostoevsky gained new impetus for his most profound moral-philosophical meditations to date (Frank 86). And he came to occupy a "unique status" of attentive reverence among the social elite, even in spite of his Tsarist loyalties - one he hoped could be used "to ward off the catastrophe that loomed closer and closer for his country as the once peaceful, apolitical Populists turned to terror out of despair" (Frank 86).

The Brothers Karamazov became the final culmination of Dostoevsky's lifelong social and artistic evolutions, and an incredibly detailed amalgamation of the paradoxes, conflicts and bitter struggles for cultural and individual identity that had shaped both his own development and the haphazard mutation of the Russian social strata surrounding him. The theme of conflict between reason and Christian faith recurrent throughout his earlier works is tremendously intensified in The Brothers Karamazov, and expressed in a deeper and broader context of Russian social life and individual experience than ever before (Frank 567). Dostoevsky, like other famed Russian novelists, had felt the savage extremes of Russian society both internally and externally; but the unique style cultivated in The Brothers Karamazov, its uncanny - and often unexpected - ability to simultaneously disturb and delight its reader, is what truly distinguishes it from other Russian realist novels, even Dostoevsky's own.
In Russian translator and literary scholar Richard Pevear's words, "the darkness in The Brothers Karamazov is real darkness, the darkness of evil, not a product of the author's state of mind. And the brightness - that is, the lightness - is also real. It is rooted in the word, the ambiguous expression of human freedom, not in any uplifting ideology" (Pevear xvii). As Pevear explains, much of the comedy in the novel comes from its reflexive "freedom of language," its constant but subtle reminders of the limited and often clumsy nature of language, displayed especially through the dialogue of characters like Fyodor Pavlovich, "the 'wicked and sentimental' old profligate," and Dmitri Fyodorovich, "a word-drunk but uneducated man" (xiv, xvii). And, as Frank notes, the novel achieves the same effect even with its most profound and central theme, treating it with "both the deepest reverence in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor and with dazzlingly satirical ironic jocularity in Ivan's conversation with his Devil" (287). This so-called "comedy of style," wherein the "manner of [the novel], as opposed to its matter, is essentially comic," provides a powerful counter-balance to moments of torment and revelation which expose the flawed, self-destructive, or incomplete nature of certain ideologies like Ivan Fyodorovich's atheism (Pevear xi). The result, as Frank argues, is part of a multi-layered attempt by Dostoevsky "to insinuate his own point of view without arousing an instantly hostile response" from his readers to increase the novel's social impact (573).

At the same time, the depth and style of characterization in The Brothers Karamazov exalts freedom of the will to new heights of action and expression. The narrative is based, like Dostoevsky's earlier works, on "the poetics of subjectivity," though with a greatly expanded scope which pushes its characters far beyond the status of social types or isolated individuals (Frank 568). They become something which is both distinctly human and individualistic, and, at the same time, take on a "superhuman majesty" as they are "linked with vast, age-old cultural-historical forces and moral-spiritual conflicts" (Frank 569). Zosima, for example, embodies and evokes ancient Eastern Orthodox traditions, and Ivan, through his "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor," expresses a revival of medieval European "mystery plays" and the New Testament (Dostoevsky 251-264, Frank 568). In this way, the stature of the characters expands in seemingly infinite directions, as their symbolic and cultural currency connects with conflicts and forces far beyond their own conscious perception.

Simultaneously, their individuality is exemplified in the main narrative actions of the story, which are driven by "the moral-psychological struggle of each of the main characters to heed the voice of his or her own conscience," not framed in a context of simple "good" or "evil" binaries, but by the abilities of each to overcome his or her egotistical impulses (Frank 571). These struggles are further crystallized in the absence of an "objective" or authoritative narrator, splitting the novel's narrative voice communally among its five main characters (Frank 572-573). The final - and perhaps most significant - result of the characters' individual freedom and converging symbolic power is the rebirth of Zosima as Alyosha at the end of the novel proper. In Alyosha's "speech at the stone," we see that he has taken up Zosima's role as the philosophical-spiritual leader of the younger boys, which, aside from evoking obvious Christ-like imagery, ends the story on an optimistic high-note with the possibility that the wisdom and humility of his religious faith may be passed on to others (Dostoevsky 768-776).

The intricate mosaic of turmoil and satire created in The Brothers Karamazov channels immensely powerful historical and spiritual symbols deeply embedded in Russian social and cultural consciousness. Yet it does so without sacrificing the extraordinarily empathetic psychological realism of its major characters, whose interaction simultaneously gives insight into broader cultural and spiritual conflicts, and explores questions of morality on a deeply intimate, individual level. Perhaps more importantly, at least for Dostoevsky's time, the novel's subtle blending of themes and blurred lines between contrasting ideologies creates a spiritual and moral dialogue so seamless between the characters and the reader that many have read the author's beliefs as the polar opposite of those Dostoevsky advocated throughout his career. In this sense, it very well may not have achieved whatever social effects he had desired it to. But The Brothers Karamazov was nonetheless a literary triumph, one that brought the spiritual and social issues Dostoevsky himself had struggled with all his life to the forefront of Russian discourse, and earned him iconic status as a champion of Russian cultural identity and historical struggle in the months before his death. It embodied the drastic changes in Russian cultural experience and the paradoxical nature of popular Russian thought, as well as the profound impact those changes had on its author.

Sources:

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. New York: Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: the Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002.

Pevear, Richard. "Introduction." The Brothers Karamazov. Fyodor Dostoevsky. New York: Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. xi-xviii.