Is The brothers Karamazov a novel of Christian experience?

A few weeks ago I wrote about my search for “novels of Christian experience”, novels written by Christians who choose to convey something of Christian experience to a mainstream audience. At the time I was reading Dostoyevsky’s novel The brothers Karamazov, and  recently I finished it. Is it a novel of Christian experience? It comes from a cultural setting different from my own, but then why else would I read a novel of Christian experience but to see the world through its creator’s eyes?1

I can’t say that the experience has left me an enthusiastic Dostoyevsky (from here on, D) fan, but this is not the novelist’s fault. Occupied with other things, I took five months to read the novel, and was certainly unable to keep some its complexity together in my head—and I changed from one English translation to another about 2/3 of the way through. I started with the 1990 Volokhonsky & Pevear translation, having read that it was the most faithful, but I found the prose quite hard going. In the end I went back to the renowned Garnett translation of 1912, and found this much easier to read—but perhaps because it had been ‘anglicised’ for an Edwardian readership.2

I find the novel’s construction quite odd. Its main characters appear and disappear for quite long spans of the novel. Alyosha, whom the narrator names as his hero, is absent for much of the time. Then there are two very long portions that are almost novels within a novel: the memoirs of elder Zosima, and Ivan’s tale of the Grand Inquisitor. D also uses very long near-monologues that I am not alone in finding hard. Among them are Ivan’s long disquisitions to Alyosha, and the speeches of the prosecutor and the defence lawyer at Mitya’s trial (which are simultaneously a satire on the recently reformed legal system). But I am getting ahead of myself.

I won’t summarise the story here. This has been done by others: see Wikipedia, Sparknotes, Litcharts, etc. The Karamazov brothers are Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov’s sons: Mitya (Dimitri), Ivan, Alyosha (Alexei), and perhaps Smerdyakov, Fyodor’s servant, rumoured to be his illegitimate son. They live in a Russian country town, and the first three are respectively 28, 24 and 20 years old. Fyodor is a wastrel who loves women, carousing and drink, and Mitya, the oldest brother, takes after him. Ivan left home early, is well educated and intellectually brilliant. Alyosha, for much of the novel, is a novice monk who seeks to live by divine precepts. Smerdyakov has had little formal education but is clever and thinks for himself.

Mitya is central to much of the narrative action. He and his father compete for the affections of the beautiful 22-year-old Grushenka and are also in conflict over Mitya’s inheritance, which leads, after his father is found murdered, to Mitya’s trial for murder and a guilty verdict for a crime he didn’t commit. Mitya’s life is chaotic, and his behaviour seesaws between the laudable and the disgraceful, as he himself is aware. 

“My God, calm my heart: what is it I want? I want Katya! Do I understand what I want? It’s the headstrong, evil Karamazov spirit! No, I am not fit for suffering. I am a scoundrel, that’s all one can say.” (Epilogue, ch 2)

This comes close to the end of the novel, when he has long turned his back on Katya, his fiancée, and has been running after Grushenka. D seems to see him as a typical Russian, or typical of a particular kind of Russian, and gives these words to the prosecutor:

“While his brothers seem to stand for ‘Europeanism’ [Ivan] and ‘the principles of the people [Alyosha],’  he [Mitya] seems to represent Russia as she is. Oh, not all Russia, not all! God preserve us, if it were! Yet, here we have her, our mother Russia, the very scent and sound of her. Oh, he is spontaneous, he is a marvelous mingling of good and evil, he is a lover of culture and Schiller, yet he brawls in taverns and plucks out the beards of his boon companions.” (Book 12, ch 6)

Ironically, Mitya’s defence lawyer agrees with the prosecutor about Mitya’s dual nature:

“But yet he [the prosecutor] talked himself of the broad Karamazov nature; he cried out about the two extremes which a Karamazov can contemplate at once. Karamazov is just such a two-sided nature, fluctuating between two extremes, that even when moved by the most violent craving for riotous gaiety, he can pull himself up, if something strikes him on the other side.” (Book 12, ch 6)

Mitya himself anticipates escaping to America with Grushenka, but cannot bear separation from Russia, which, it seems, is for him coupled with God:

“I hate that America already! And though they may be wonderful at machinery, every one of them, damn them, they are not of my soul. I love Russia, Alyosha, I love the Russian God, though I am a scoundrel myself. I shall choke there!” he exclaimed . .  (Epilogue, ch 2)

Earlier we read:

Then, oh, then a totally new life would begin at once! He dreamed of this other, this renewed and now “virtuous” life (“it must, it must be virtuous”) ceaselessly and feverishly. He thirsted for this resurrection and renewal. (Book 8, ch 1)

But Mitya’s dream of “resurrection and renewal”—note the spiritual language—is not spiritual. He is dreaming of a life with Grushenka. Mitya, then, seems to be D’s prototypical Russian male, swinging between glory and awfulness,3 and with a spiritual vision that barely differentiates between Russia and God. His monologues are so incoherent that we learn little from them except that his mind is disordered.

Alyosha, by contrast, is anything but divided. He is D’s vision of how one ought to live. Explaining Alyosha’s entry into the monastery D writes, 

As soon as he reflected seriously and was struck by the conviction that immortality and God exist, he naturally said at once to himself: “I want to live for immortality, and I reject any halfway compromise.” (Book 1, ch 5)

Alyosha lives without judging others (cf Romans 8:28):

There was something in him that told one, that convinced one (and it was so all his life afterwards) that he did not want to be a judge of men, that he would not take judgment upon himself and would not condemn anyone for anything. It seemed, even, that he accepted everything without the least condemnation, though often with deep sadness. Moreover, in this sense he even went so far that no one could either surprise or frighten him, and this even in his very early youth. (Bk 1, ch 4)

This quality comes to the fore in a subplot which has Alyosha interacting with a group of aggressive young boys, and specifically with their precocious and proud young teenage leader Kolya. Kolya, like Mitya, sees himself as a ’scoundrel’, but Alyosha tells him he has a lovely nature, albeit one that has been perverted through his upbringing (Book 10, ch 6).

It is impossible to talk about Alyosha without talking about Zosima, the priest and monastic elder with whom Alyosha undergoes his novitiate, because together they present D’s version of Christian theology and how this is worked out in life. D understands both repentance and God’s love, represented in Zosima’s words to a young widow seeking absolution from past sins.

“Do not be afraid of anything, never be afraid, and do not grieve. Just let repentance not slacken in you, and God will forgive everything. There is not and cannot be in the whole world such a sin that the Lord will not forgive one who truly repents of it. A man even cannot commit so great a sin as would exhaust God’s boundless love. How could there be a sin that exceeds God’s love? (Book 2, ch 3)

Much later, Alyosha meets his agnostic brother Ivan, and they argue about their respective beliefs. Alyosha argues unambiguously for the incarnation and the atonement:

“you asked just now if there is in the whole world a being who could and would have the right to forgive. But there is such a being, and he can forgive everything, forgive all and for all, because he himself gave his innocent blood for all and for everything. You’ve forgotten about him, but it is on him that the structure is being built, and it is to him that they will cry out: ‘Just art thou, O Lord, for thy ways have been revealed!’” (Book 5, ch 4)

Zosima instructs his fellow-priests about humble love of others:

“Love one another, fathers,” the elder taught (as far as Alyosha could recall afterwards).“Love God’s people. For we are not holier than those in the world because we have come here and shut ourselves within these walls, but, on the contrary, anyone who comes here, by the very fact that he has come, already knows himself to be worse than all those who are in the world, worse than all on earth … And the longer a monk lives within his walls, the more keenly he must be aware of it. For otherwise he had no reason to come here.” (Book 4, ch 1)

But there are also features of the theology represented by Zosima and Alyosha that are somewhat unfamiliar to western Christians. Zosima teaches,

“For you must know, my dear ones, that each of us is undoubtedly guilty on behalf of all and for all on earth, not only because of the common guilt of the world, but personally, each one of us, for all people and for each person on this earth. This knowledge is the crown of the monk’s path, and of every man’s path on earth. For monks are not a different sort of men, but only such as all men on earth ought also to be. Only then will our hearts be moved to a love that is infinite, universal, and that knows no satiety. Then each of us will be able to gain the whole world by love and wash away the world’s sins with his tears … Let each of you keep close company with his heart, let each of you confess to himself untiringly.” (Book 4, ch 1)

I am assuming that Volokhonsky & Pevear’s translation is accurate when Zosima says that “each of us is undoubtedly guilty on behalf of all and for all on earth . . . personally, each one of us, for all people and for each person on this earth.” D repeats this assertion several times in different words (e.g. in Zosima’s memoir in Book 6, ch 3), and I am not sure what he intends. Instead of ‘guilty on behalf of’ Garnett has ‘is responsible for’, but I wonder if this is an anglicisation of D’s concept.

Far clearer in D’s theology is that the Kingdom of God is conceived as coming on earth in its fulness as human beings learn to love each other:

He was not at all troubled that the elder, after all, stood solitary before him: “No matter, he is holy, in his heart there is the secret of renewal for all, the power that will finally establish the truth on earth, and all will be holy and will love one another, and there will be neither rich nor poor, neither exalted nor humiliated, but all will be like the children of God, and the true kingdom of Christ will come.” That was the dream in Alyosha’s heart. (Book 1, ch 5)

This is not a purely earthy kingdom, however. Zosima’s unnamed evening visitor in Moscow tells him:

Everywhere now the human mind has begun laughably not to understand that a man’s true security lies not in his own solitary effort, but in the general wholeness of humanity. But there must needs come a term to this horrible isolation, and everyone will all at once realize how unnaturally they have separated themselves one from another. Such will be the spirit of the time, and they will be astonished that they sat in darkness for so long, and did not see the light. Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the heavens. (Book 6, ch 2)

But Zosima thinks that the kingdom is a way off (I don’t understand the reference to ’seven righteous men’):

“It is true,” the elder smiled, “that now Christian society itself is not yet ready, and stands only on seven righteous men; but as they are never wanting, it abides firmly all the same, awaiting its complete transfiguration from society as still an almost pagan organization, into one universal and sovereign Church. And so be it, so be it, if only at the end of time, for this alone is destined to be fulfilled! (Book 2, ch 5)

He also appears to think that God’s kingdom is specifically or especially associated with Russia. Zosima writes,

But God will save his people, for Russia is great in her humility. I dream of seeing our future, and seem to see it clearly already: for it will come to pass that even the most corrupt of our rich men will finally be ashamed of his riches before the poor man, and the poor man, seeing his humility, will understand and yield to him in joy, and will respond with kindness to his gracious shame. Believe me, it will finally be so: things are heading that way. . . Let us preserve the image of Christ, that it may shine forth like a precious diamond to the whole world … So be it, so be it! (Book 6, ch 3).

Perhaps the nature of the association for D is that, in Ivan’s words, Russians talk 

“About none other than the universal questions: is there a God, is there immortality? And those who do not believe in God, well, they will talk about socialism and anarchism, about transforming the whole of mankind according to a new order, but it’s the same damned thing . . .”

and Alyosha responds,

“Yes, for real Russians the questions of the existence of God and immortality, or, as you just said, the same questions from the other end, are of course first and foremost, and they should be,” Alyosha spoke, looking intently at his brother with the same quiet and searching smile. (Book 5, ch 3).

It would be wrong, however, to see Alyosha simply as a mouthpiece for D’s theological statements. He is much more than this: a peacemaker among other characters, a wise discerner of morality. He experiences God.

In his ardent prayer, he did not ask God to explain his confusion to him, but only thirsted for joyful tenderness, the same tenderness that always visited his soul after praising and glorifying God, of which his prayer before going to sleep usually consisted. This joy that visited him always drew after it a light and peaceful sleep. (Book 3, ch 11)

The most striking of these experiences follows Zosima’s death, when Alyosha is about to follow Zosima’s instructions and leave the monastery and minister in the outside world. I am tempted to compare this to the Holy Spirit’s appearance at Jesus’ baptism just before he commenced his ministry.

It was as if threads from all those innumerable worlds of God all came together in his soul, and it was trembling all over, “touching other worlds.” He wanted to forgive everyone and for everything, and to ask forgiveness, oh, not for himself! but for all and for everything, “as others are asking for me,” rang again in his soul. But with each moment he felt clearly and almost tangibly something as firm and immovable as this heavenly vault descend into his soul. Some sort of idea, as it were, was coming to reign in his mind—now for the whole of his life and unto ages of ages. He fell to the earth a weak youth and rose up a fighter, steadfast for the rest of his life, and he knew it and felt it suddenly, in that very moment of his ecstasy. Never, never in all his life would Alyosha forget that moment. “Someone visited my soul in that hour,” he would say afterwards, with firm belief in his words. . . (Book 7, ch 4)

Ivan is the most difficult of the brothers to present briefly, as he often presents his own thinking in lengthy arguments. The brothers Karamazov appeared as a serial throughout 1879 and 1880, but it had been forming in D’s mind for a decade. It is written against the background of the social changes that followed Tsar Alexander II’s grant of freedom to the serfs in 1869, and of the ideas and ideologies that were entering Russia from the west. Long before Ivan’s struggles are presented, the battle is depicted from a Christian perspective by the monk-priest Father Paissy:

“Remember, young man [Alyosha], unceasingly,” Father Paissy began directly, without any preamble, “that the science of this world, having united itself into a great force, has, especially in the past century, examined everything heavenly that has been bequeathed to us in sacred books, and, after hard analysis, the learned ones of this world have absolutely nothing left of what was once holy. But they have examined parts and missed the whole, and their blindness is even worthy of wonder. Meanwhile the whole stands before their eyes as immovably as ever, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Book 4, ch 1)

During his years in St Peterburg, Ivan has absorbed western ideas, and his mind is a battleground between traditional Russian Christianity and western atheism. Agnosticism has the edge because in Ivan’s ironic view, it provides a more secure basis for the Christian values of love and compassion than Russian Christianity has done. Ivan is often depicted as the atheist for whom “everything is lawful”, but this is not  how he presents himself to Alyosha in Book 5, chapters 3 & 4. He tells Alyosha that he accepts “God pure and simple”. If God exists, he continues, and he created the earth, he did it in accordance with the three dimensions of Euclidean geometry, which asserts that parallel lines cannot meet. But there are thinkers who believe they might meet somewhere in infinity. Ivan says he cannot grasp this, let alone God, and it is best not to think about such matters. So he simply accepts God, and God’s unknown wisdom and purposes. He believes in the Word of the first verse of John’s Gospel. But he cannot accept the world God has created, with all its suffering, although he has “a childlike conviction” that in the end this will be healed and forgiveness will prevail, and everything that has happened to humanity will be justified. But, says Ivan, he cannot and does not want to accept this because, he implies, he cannot accept the world’s suffering. He doesn’t understand why the world is arranged the way it is. Are people to blame because “they were given paradise, they wanted freedom, and stole fire from heaven”? (Book 5, ch 4) Ivan says that with his Euclidean mind he can only grasp that there is suffering, that everything is cause-and-effect and no one is to blame. But this doesn’t satisfy: he needs retribution for the world’s suffering, especially the suffering of children. If it comes after he is dead, he wants to be resurrected so that he can see it.

“I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion [cf Isaiah 11:6], and the murdered man rise up and embrace his murderer.  I want to be there when everyone suddenly finds out what it was all for . . . Listen: if everyone must suffer, in order to buy eternal harmony with their suffering, pray tell me what have children got to do with it? It’s quite incomprehensible why they should have to suffer, and why they should buy harmony with their suffering.” (Book 5, ch 4)

Ivan’s is a contorted Christian theology, one that he cannot accept, but it is Christian nonetheless. Ivan is an educated thinker, and a realistic one, as his dialogue with Alyosha reveals:

“I must make an admission,” Ivan began. “I never could understand how it’s possible to love one’s neighbors. In my opinion, it is precisely one’s neighbors that one cannot possibly love. . . If we’re to come to love a man, the man himself should stay hidden, because as soon as he shows his face—love vanishes.”

“The elder Zosima has spoken of that more than once,” Alyosha remarked. “He also says that a man’s face often prevents many people, who are as yet inexperienced in love, from loving him. But there is still much love in mankind, almost like Christ’s love, I know that, Ivan…” 

. . . [Ivan responds] “Christ’s love for people is in its kind a miracle impossible on earth. True, he was God. But we are not gods.” (Book 5, ch 4)

Commentators often characterise Ivan as the one who says that if God doesn’t exist, “all things are lawful”. I have found this motto twelve times in the novel, but only twice on Ivan’s lips, when he is talking with Alyosha after he has told the story of the Grand Inquisitor4. (Book 5, ch 5) All the other instances are quotations of Ivan’s words by other characters. When Ivan uses them himself, he is as much as anything challenging Alyosha to accept him as he is. But, as we have seen, Ivan’s thinking is far more complex than the motto. Other characters may see him this way, but this is not how D depicts him. 

Perhaps the most significant three repetitions of the motto are the servant Smerdyakov’s in his final conversation with Ivan (Book 11, ch 8). Smerdyakov has confessed to him that he has killed the brothers’ (and perhaps his own) father, and justifies it by hammering home the fact that Ivan had taught him long before that “all things are lawful”. This, Smerdyakov says, makes Ivan complicit in his father’s murder. This haunts Ivan, and the Devil repeats it again twice to Ivan in his delirium (Book 11, ch 9). However, neither Smerdyakov nor the Devil can be relied upon as tellers of truth.

It is never exactly clear why Smerdyakov has committed the murder, but it seems that for D he represents the logical outcome of atheism. He tells Ivan, “For if there’s no everlasting God, there’s no such thing as virtue, and there’s no need of it. You were right there. So that’s how I looked at it” (Book 11, ch 8). Life is thus meaningless, and after Ivan’s departure Smerdyakov hangs himself.

The brothers Karamazov is certainly a theological novel. Is it a novel of Christian experience? I think it is, but by no means a happy experience. Of the three brothers, Alyosha seems to represent the ideal to which D would aspire: strong in faith, untroubled by awkward questions, loving, non-judgmental, a leader of men. But D enables us to see much further into Ivan’s mind than into either Alyosha’s or Mitya’s. Ivan is tortured by questions about how people’s (especially children’s) sufferings can be aligned with Christian theology, and it seems to me that these are D’s questions. How can one embody the ideal that one cherishes, yet accept the way the world is? Even Mitya admits to similar feelings:

“And I’m tormented by God. Tormented only by that. What if he doesn’t exist? What if Rakitin is right, that it’s an artificial idea of mankind? So then, if he doesn’t exist, man is chief of the earth, of the universe. Splendid! Only how is he going to be virtuous without God? A good question! I keep thinking about it. Because whom will he love then—man, I mean? To whom will he be thankful, to whom will he sing the hymn?” (Book 11, ch 4)

Some summaries of the novel suggests that it ends with regeneration, at least for Mitya and his two ladyfriends Katya and Grushenka. Yes, there is a measure of forgiveness, but it is embedded in human emotion. Ivan is still delirious. Smerdyakov has taken his own life. But Alyosha makes the novel’s the final theological assertion, when he tells the gang of boys after the funeral of one of them,

“Certainly we shall all rise again, certainly we shall see each other and shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that has happened!” (Epilogue, ch 3)

  1. My formal study of literature in the final years of high school (1957-60) and as a major part of my Undergraduate degree in L.C. Knights’ English department at the University of Bristol (1960-63) was based  on the then current principle that one read and critiqued the text itself, and did not read authors’ biographies or other background material. In general I still apply this principle. I didn’t read Malcolm V. Jones’ Introduction to the Volokhonsky & Pevear translation until I had written this. My response to the novel chimes in with some of what he reports from the huge literature on Dostoyevsky’s writings and on his biography. In other respects my post here differs from the mainstream.[]
  2. Curiously five out of seven English translations retain the Russian word order, Brat’ya Karamazovy [brothers Karamazov], in their title. Only Julius Katzer (1980) and Ignat Avsey (1994) use the more natural English of The Karamazov Brothers.[]
  3. Costica Bradatan has written a striking essay on this duality, entitled ’The two abysses of the soul’, published in the Los Angeles Review of Books of 31 July 2014 in the context of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and very relevant to Russia’s present aggression in Ukraine.[]
  4. It tells of Jesus’ secret appearance in Spain during the Inquisition and his arrest by the Grand Inquisitor, who tells him that the Church has covertly rejected him, accepting instead the temptations offered by the Devil, as this allows a more orderly society that protects its people from dangerous thinking. Jesus doesn’t say a word, but simply kisses the Inquisitor. The whole setting suggests that it is among other things an attack on Roman Catholicism, for D another west European phonomenon to be wary of.[]
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