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Underground eXperts United File 540
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Underground eXperts United
Presents...
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[ Dostoyevsky And The Brothers Karamazov ] [ By Eric Chaet ]
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DOSTOYEVSKY AND THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
by Eric Chaet
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV is, among other things, a murder-mystery novel. Tho
it is not much of a mystery to us, the readers.
There are four brothers: Ivan, in his late 20's, a very clever fellow,
'too sophisticated' for faith in the old ways of Russian thinking,
including belief in God and virtue; Dmitri, in his mid 20's, a swaggering
ex-lieutenant, a drinker, undisciplined, loud, passionate, ruled by his
heart, not his mind, whose ineffective moral compass is a commitment to
'honor'; Alyosha, 20 - in the early part of the book a monk - pure of heart,
kind, caring, not bothered that others consider him simple-minded;
Smerdyakov (Stinker), whom none of the other three realize is their brother,
son of their dissipated father Fyodor and an idiot-girl who used to wander
around "our provincial town" in only a smock and bare-footed, thru the
winter, even.
Ivan is the son of one mother, Dmitri and Alyosha of another, Smerdykov
of the idiot girl. Their father, Fyodor, neglected them all, to what would
now certainly be judged a criminal extent. If the two servants had not taken
care of them, they would have starved, frozen, been devoured by lice.
This Fyodor was a nobleman without assets in his youth, who gained wealth
by toadying among the more prosperous nobility, until he got enough money to
earn money as a money-lender and trader, and to indulge himself in
womanizing and drink. He also liked to quote the fashionable ideas of the
time, from Schiller's "The Robbers" for instance.
Smerdyakov, vain and insolent, is his cook.
Ivan and Dmitri have recently returned to "our provincial town". Dmitri
is sure that his father owes him money, the inheritance from his mother's
wealth. He gets drunk a lot, and makes a lot of noise about how, if his
father won't give him his due, he will kill his father. (When the father IS
murdered, all the evidence seems to point to Dmitri, and he is convicted.)
Dmitri falls for Grushenka, and so does his father, Fyodor. She toys
with them both, caring for neither. Fyodor offers her 3,000 roubles if she
will come to him. Which, of course, drives Dmitri wild, because he is
obsessed with Grushenka, and, also, because he considers the 3,000 roubles
his.
Ivan indulges in 'intellectual' discussions with his father, Smerdyakov,
a variety of ladies and gentlemen of the town, and even the monks, and,
toward the end, with Dmitri in his prison cell.
He plants ideas in Smerdyakov's mind that lead, eventually, to Smerdyakov
considering himself a very clever person, cleverer than those around him,
and to his deciding that murder can sometimes be justified, and to his
murdering Fyodor, the dissipated and abusive father of the four sons.
When Ivan realizes how he has 'programmed' Smerdyakov - at the same time
Ivan begins to realize that his own ideas lead to a dead end - he loses
control to a greater and greater extent, and lapses into, first,
hallucinations (the devil visits him, and is fond of intellectual
discussion), then 'brain-fever'.
Alyosha, instructed by his mentor - just before this mentor's death - in
the monastary to return to 'the world' serves everyone with whom he comes
into contact, mostly by listening to them rant, with respectful and caring
attention, and helping them when they fall into despair or sickness. He is,
when not carrying around too much of the others' suffering, happy - and
makes friends with a group of pre-teens. At the very end of the book,
Alyosha delivers a brief speech to them, to which they listen attentively,
tho they tend to scoff at what adults say in general - because they have
learned that he cares for and respects them, and because they also care for
and respect him. The speech is about how such caring, and kindness, will
serve as antidotes, thruout life, for the evil one encounters.
DOSTOYEVSKY WAS A MAN of great intellect, whose fate it was to live,
primarily, among non-intellectuals, and to see thru the errors and
pretensions of the prominent intellectuals and would-be intellectuals of
his time.
Dostoyevsky was doing his work mostly in the third-quarter of the
nineteenth century, in Russia, when faith in God and in the doctrines of
Orthodox Christianity (as opposed to either Catholicism or Protestantism)
were beginning to be widely scoffed at, especially in the upper classes, and
there was wide-spread admiration for the ideas of the French Revolution,
with a good deal of nihilism - that is, belief in having no beliefs.
When a person without acute and comprehensive intellect operates with
cynicism regarding the beliefs of those he or she lives among, and a faith
that people, if liberated from such beliefs, can do better making up their
own thoughts and moves - there is frequently great mental suffering, posing,
and violence performed to convince oneself that one is free.
This is frequently seen in our own time, in western civilization, too.
Dostoyevsky was such a nihilist (and a revolutionary) as a youth - but
spent time among (non-political) criminals in Siberia, then, on probation,
in a provincial town, with people mostly not his intellectual equals. Some,
tho, were quite brilliant, some extraordinarily passionate, and some were
extraordinarily kind and helpful - and some combined all these qualities.
(Some were extraordinarily cruel and insensitive, too. Most, of course, were
as conventional as they were able to be.) When he returned to Petersburg,
Dostoyevsky's companions were his fellow petty bureaucrats - i.e., clerks
below middle-management - in a thoroughly corrupt and failing system - where
courage, for instance, was considered a character flaw, and compassion
laughable.
The struggles of such people - and Dostoyevsky's own struggle, trying to
survive and to make a come-back (he had had big success with a juvenile
novel, POOR FOLK, early) as a convicted felon and a man with suspect
political leanings in times of fierce reaction and fitting in for the
purpose of thriving - became the material of his great novels, which he
wrote, mostly, in St. Petersburg, rapidly - so that they are by no means
elegant - for money he desperately needed.
Each novel became more competently written and comprehensive in examining
the social situation, passionate relationships, psychological and spiritual
conditions and catastrophes, and occasional triumphant transcendence.
THE BROTHERS KARAMZOV was the last - and the wisest - completed just before
Dostoyevsky's death.
Recalling it frequently serves me as a kind of beacon, a lighthouse -
when I seem to be navigating primarily in the dark: when others seem to be
acting toward or reacting with me and among one another almost entirely in a
destructive manner - believing what is not so, and inadvertantly causing
destructive results - placing apparently insurmountable obstacles in the
path of that which would benefit those who are suffering thru no fault of
their own - and which would relieve the very conditions they themselves
complain of most vociferously - or suffer from in proud secrecy.
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