Thank you all for reading with me these many weeks and especially to those who have shared your thoughts and observations along the way. Please continue, no matter when you reach the end. I would love to hear from you all who have been reading along—many more, I know, than have yet commented here.

I’m interested in what might have been the sequel: Alyosha at thirty-three (another referential age) and the “boys,” now young men, Kolya, Smurov, Kartashov, et al. (one of them likely to become a traitor to the group), involved in political conspiracy against the tsar, Alyosha the one who will fulfill Kolya’s fantasy of offering himself “as a sacrifice for truth… to die for all mankind…”

I imagine Alyosha facing the firing squad voluntarily, innocent, responsible for his disciples (all guilty for all) and taking the fall for an assassination plot that isn’t his own, to protect the others, also innocent, only one of them guilty (perhaps Kolya? or Smurov?—one the guilty, the other the traitor?)—a projection from the drama we have just witnessed, the innocent Mitya sentenced to Siberia.

More likely, the whole circle will become that dangerous specter alluded to in the novel, Christian socialists—by which Dostoevsky certainly means Russian Orthodox Christian socialists—and I imagine this theme of the dangerousness of this Christian-socialist combination would have been important in the sequel’s development, even when or if the dangerous circle were to take their conspiracy all the way to assassinating the tsar—parricide writ large.

Is it possible to see Alyosha himself as the assassin?—his sacrifice as a martyr not only in receiving the punishment but in taking action that brings on the guilt?

Maybe so, a lot can change in thirteen years, and there are many clues to the possibilities throughout The Brothers Karamazov.

There are also questions about the fates of Katerina and Ivan, Grushenka and Mitya. According to some accounts, Grusha is to return to Russia and end up partnered with Alyosha after his unhappy marriage with Lise. Would she then be one among his band of followers, not merely students but disciples, the redeemed Mary Magdelene figure? What can we imagine of her life with Mitya? Has he perhaps gone over to Katerina after all (but what then of Ivan?) and become an important political figure contributing to the welfare of the nation—the redeemed man of Madame Khoklakhov’s vision?

I could easily imagine Mitya being killed in the wild west of the America he so hates, if I didn’t also recall that clue from the narrator many chapters ago that suggested his return and looking back on these events himself. In accord with his plan of escape, however, he would have had to return in disguise—unless, after all, it is Grushenka who returns to tell stories of Mitya’s life in America before he died there. Here.

I wonder, too, what role Kalganov would have played. And once again, what will have become of Ivan?

So many novels are possible, I can’t help wondering whether this suggestion of unfinishedness is an element of what makes The Brothers Karamazov as great a great novel as it is. It shimmers with endless possibility. Whatever the sequel might have been, would it—could it?—have diminished the novel that we have?

Leave a comment

Share The Brothers Karamazov Slow Read

“It’s all so strange, Karamazov, such grief, and then pancakes all of a sudden—!”

And here we are too, arriving at the end, with Kolya as he pivots on an instant from expressions of great compassion to the familiar irritable arrogance and back again.

“Let us first of all and before all be kind, then honest, and then—let us never forget one another,” Alyosha says to the boys at the stone.

“You are all dear to me, gentlemen, from now on I shall keep you all in my heart, and I ask you to keep me in your hearts, too! Well, who has united us in this good, kind feeling, which we will remember and intend to remember always, all our lives, who, if not Ilyushechka, that good boy, that kind boy, that boy dear to us unto ages of ages! Let us never forget him and may his memory be eternal and good in our hearts now and unto ages of ages!”

And in his celebration of life—“Ah, children, ah, dear friends, do not be afraid of life! How good life is when you do something good and rightful!”—Alyosha comes back to Kolya’s pancakes: “Don’t be disturbed that we’ll be eating pancakes. It’s an ancient eternal thing, and there’s good in that, too.”

This final chapter, beyond its pathos, is a set-up for things to come that never come, and with its celebration of life even in death it is an evocation of Easter: from Kolya’s “I feel very sad, and if only it were possible to resurrect him, I’d give everything in the world!” to the number of boys gathered around Alyosha—twelve—for his spontaneous sermon at the stone—the stone in the road where Snegiryov wanted to bury Ilyushechka (whose body, by the way, gives off “almost no smell”).

“What an idea, to bury him by some heathenish stone, like some hanged man,” the old landlady said sternly.

The number of days between Ilyusha’s death and the present moment parallels the distance from Good Friday’s crucifixion to Easter Sunday’s resurrection: the action of the epilogue takes place five days after Mitya’s trial: his sentencing came the day after the trial; Mitya fell into a fever the next day (two days after the court’s decision); Ilyusha died the day after that (two days after the sentencing and two days ago).

As the chapter delivers the Hosannahs of one of Ivan’s poems, it also suggests the direction of the unwritten book to come. “Oh, if only I, too, could some day offer myself as a sacrifice for truth!” Kolya cries. “I should like to die for all mankind, and as for disgrace, it makes no difference: let our names perish.”

Thank you all for reading together—please keep commenting and watch for a follow-up coming soon. Alyosha gets today’s last words:

“Let us never forget how good we once felt here, all together, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, for the time that we loved the poor boy, perhaps better than we actually are.”

Leave a comment

Share The Brothers Karamazov Slow Read

“I said ‘forgive me’ to her because I wanted to punish myself to the end. She did not forgive … I love her for that!”

Plans for escape and extraordinary visions of the future after one last diatribe about “America”—

“This America, devil take it, I hate it already! So Grusha will be with me, but look at her: is she an American woman? She’s Russian, every little bone of her is Russian, she’ll pine for her native land, and I’ll see all the time that she’s pining away for my sake, that she has taken up such a cross for my sake, and what has she done wrong? And I, will I be able to stand the local rabble, though every last one of them may be better than I am? I hate this America even now! … devil take them, they’re not my people, not of my soul! I love Russia, Alexei, I love the Russian God, though I myself am a scoundrel!”

—a visit from Katya, final or not—

“That’s why I loved you, for your magnanimous heart! … And you do not need my forgiveness, nor I yours; it’s all the same whether you forgive or not, all my life you will remain a wound in my soul, and I in yours—that’s how it should be…”

—and one last bitter encounter:

“It was her proud lips speaking, not her heart,” Grushenka said with a sort of loathing. “If she delivers you—I’ll forgive everything…”

It’s a mark of Dostoevsky’s polyphony that in all these contested relationships every possibility voiced or dreamed seems possibly true. This effect is most pronounced in respect to the love relationships and the possible jealousies, in which no fixed answer can be found, expressed so gently here:

Thus they prattled to each other, and their talk was frantic, almost senseless, and perhaps also not even truthful, but at that moment everything was truth, and they both utterly believed what they were saying.

And one more little chapter to go.

Leave a comment

Share The Brothers Karamazov Slow Read

Once we finish I’ll follow up with a wrap-up post or two—please stay tuned and continue offering your thoughts along the way and after finishing.

“I swear by God and by his terrible judgment, I am not guilty of my father’s blood! Katya, I forgive you! Brothers, friends, have pity on the other woman!”

“The only thing lacking is poetry,” Ippolit Kirillovich says in expressing his contempt for Fetyukovich’s arguments and eloquence, but these words also point me toward what is lacking yet for the reader: the verdict.

First we hear some final words from the defense attorney, who in his plea to the jury for mercy offers his own version of the decision’s significance to Russia as a whole—

“Oh, it is so easy for you to do it, this act of mercy, for in the absence of any evidence even slightly resembling the truth, it will be too diffiuclt for you to say: ‘Yes, guilty.’ It is better to let ten who are guilty go, than to punish one who is innocent—do you hear, do you hear this majestic voice from the last century of our glorious history? Is it for me, insignificant as I am, to remind you that the Russian courts exist not only for punishment but also for the salvation of the ruined man! … In your hands is the fate of my client, in your hands is also the fate of our Russian truth.”

—and from Mitya himself, “tired in body and in spirit,” no longer shouting:

“My thanks to the prosecutor, he said much about me that I did not know, but it is not true that I killed my father, the prosecutor is mistaken! My thanks also to the defense attorney, I wept listening to him, but it is not true that I killed my father, there was no need even to suppose it! And don’t believe the doctors, I’m entirely in my right mind, only my soul is heavy. If you spare me, if you let me go—I pray for you. I will become better, I give you my word, I give it before God. And if you condemn me—I will break the sword over my head myself, and kiss the broken pieces. But spare me, do not deprive me of my God, I know myself: I will murmur! My soul is heavy, gentlemen … spare me!”

At last as the jury deliberates we wait with the crowd’s chorus of gossipy voices, and when they return after exactly one hour, their verdict leads to chaos and Mitya’s final cry.

Leave a comment

Share The Brothers Karamazov Slow Read

“Why must we assume what we imagine, or imagine what we have assumed?”

Not merely offering the counterpoint, the defense to the prosecution, Fetyukovich returns us almost to the events as Dostoevsky has shown them to us, undoing the prosecutor’s storytelling with a deconstructive logic of his own, in this instance with echoes of Descartes:

“Thank God, we have gotten to the point: ‘Since he was in the garden, it means he also killed him.’ On these two words—since he was, it also inevitably means—everything, the entire accusation, rests: ‘He was, therefore it means.’ And what if it does not mean, even though he was?”

Still, when he gets to Smerdyakov, whose full confession to Ivan we have heard, Fetyukovich extends him the benefit of the doubt with regard to premeditation and shamming the first seizure—a little bit odd, in light of his reading of Smerdyakov’s character, but perhaps in keeping with his method:

“I left convinced that he was a decidedly malicious being, enormously ambitious, vengeful, and burning with envy. .. he hated his origin… was irreverent towards the servant Grigory and his wife … He cursed Russia and laughed at her. He dreamed of going to France and remaking himself as a Frenchman… he only lacked the means to do so. It seems to me that he loved no one but himself, and his respect for himself was peculiarly high.”

And he is not done.

Leave a comment

Share The Brothers Karamazov Slow Read

“This thought of mine—my formula—is as follows: the overwhelming totality of the facts is against the defendant and at the same time there is not one fact that will stand up to criticism, if it is considered seperately, on its own. … It was in order to demolish this terrible totality of facts and show how undemonstrable and fantastic each separate accusing fact is, that I undertook the defense of this case.”

The prosecutor’s speech continues, with all its strengths and weaknesses, until we come to his finale, again invoking the importance of a guilty verdict for all of Russia and for the world’s (i.e., Europe’s) view of Russia as a “fateful troika…racing headlong, perhaps to its destruction”: a world that “will stand aside for the troika galloping at breakneck speed … not at all, perhaps, out of respect… but simply from horror—mark that—from horror, and perhaps from loathing for her.”

“Do not tempt them,” Ippolit Kirillovich argues, “do not add to their ever-increasing hatred with a verdict justifying the murder of a father by his own son…!”

After an interlude offering the view from the chorus, the onlookers, supporters and detractors—always here to remind us of the many voices at play—at last we start to hear the case for the defense:

“Here, then, is a different psychology. I myself, gentlemen of the jury, have resorted to psychology now, in order to demonstrate that one can draw whatever conclusions one likes from it. It all depends on whose hands it is in. Pyschology prompts novels even from the most serious people, and quite unintentionally. I am speaking of excessive psychology, gentlemen of the jury, of a certain abuse of it.”

Leave a comment

Share The Brothers Karamazov Slow Read

Here, apropos the “signals,” Ippolit Kirillovich left off his accusatory speech for a time, finding it necessary to expatiate on Smerdyakov, so as to exhaust completely this whole parenthetic episode to do with suspecting Smerdyakov of the murder, and have done with the idea once and for all. He did so quite thoroughly, and everyone understood that, despite the contempt he showed for this suggestion, he still considered it very important.

So near and yet so far: from psychologizing Mitya (and again, at length, with the first person plural that assumes such intimacy and feels so condescending) to psychologizing Smerdyakov. It’s fascinating to me how close Ippolit Kirillovich frequently gets to the truth (if our understanding of these events is the truth) only to veer away from it and dismiss it as implausible fantasy.

“Today’s testimony from a delirious man was followed by a document…containing beforehand a detailed program of the crime. Why, then, are we looking for the program and its authors? It was accomplished exactly following this program, and accomplished by none other than its author. Yes, gentlemen of the jury, ‘accomplished as written!’ And in no case, in no case did we run respectfully and timorously from our father’s window, being at the same time firmly convinced that our sweetheart was there with him.”

Leave a comment

Share The Brothers Karamazov Slow Read

“And here is the real horror, that such dark affairs have almost ceased to horrify us! It is this, and not the isolated crime of one individual or another, that should horrify us: that we are so used to it. Where lie the reasons for our indifference, our lukewarm attitude towards such affairs, such signs of the times, which prophesy for us an unenviable future?”

At last our psychologizing prosecutor is given free rein to express his view of the case, of all the Karamazovs, of Russia itself.

Of the victim he says, “The old man’s whole moral rule is—après moi le déluge.” He characterizes Ivan as “a modern young man, brilliantly educated…who no longer believes in anything,” and Smerdyakov as “a certain sick idiot.” Of Alyosha he says:

For my part, I wish the good and gifted young man all the best, I hope that his youthful sunnymindedness and yearning for popular foundations will not turn later, as so often happens, into dark mysticism on the moral side, and witless chauvinism on the civic side—two qualitites that perhaps threaten more evil for the nation than even the premature corruption owing to a falsely understood and gratuitously acquired European enlightenment from which his elder brother suffers.

According to Pevear and Volokhonsky, charges akin to dark mysticism and witless chauvinism were often made against Dostoevsky by his critics. And although Dostoevsky himself clearly has no patience for “gratuitously acquired European enlightenment,” I doubt he would have regarded Ivan’s struggles with reason and faith primarly in this light.

Ippolit Kirillovich’s summary of the case for the prosecution is built on psychological assumptions I feel encouraged by all that has come before not to share, so when he turns his attention finally to Mitya, I wonder is he giving voice to another superficial version of the truth, or is he speaking suddenly for Dostoevsky?

“In contrast to the ‘Europeanism’ and the ‘popular foundations’ of his brothers, he seems to represent ingenuous Russia—oh, not all, not all, and God forbid it should be all! Yet she is here, our dear mother Russia, we can smell her, we can hear her. Oh, we are ingenuous, we are an amazing mixture of good and evil…”

And so on. The shift from the conventional third person singular “he” to the first person plural “we” stands out once again as an expression of intimacy and condescension, and in this instance it continues at length, is dropped, and returns.

We are not greedy, no, but give us money, more and more money, as much money as possible, and then you see how generously, with what scorn for filthy lucre, we can throw it away in one night of unrestrained carousing.

And after going into detail about the exchanges of money between Mitya and Katerina:

“Most likely in the first instance he was sincerely noble, and in the second just as sincerely base. Why? Precisely because we are of a broad, Karamazovian nature … capable of containing all possible opposites and of contemplating both abysses at once, the abyss above us, an abyss of lofty ideals, and the abyss beneath us, an abyss of the lowest and foulest degradation… Two abysses, two abysses, gentlemen, in one and the same moment—without that we are wretched and dissatisfied, our existence is incomplete.”

Two abysses—the abysses of the novel itself? Or does this image express a view entirely opposite to the novel’s “all are guilty for all”?

Leave a comment

Share The Brothers Karamazov Slow Read

“… and all because of the monster, all to save the monster!”

Ivan testifies:

“A murdered father, and they pretend to be frightened… Liars! Everyone wants his father dead. Viper devours viper… If there were no parricide, they’d all get angry and go home in a foul temper… Circuses! ‘Bread and circuses!’ And me, I’m a good one!. .. Calm yourselves. I’m not mad. I’m simply a murderer! One really cannot expect eloquence from a murderer… Well, set the monster free … he’s begun his hymn ...Oh, how stupid this all is! Well, take me instead of him! I must have come for some reason… Why, why is everything in the world so stupid!”

Katerina insists on testifying again, provoked—as she was before, in private, to show Ivan Mitya’s drunken letter—so now to show the letter to the court.

She finally described with extraordinary clarity, which often shines through briefly in moments of such an overwrought condition, how for those two whole months Ivan Fyodorovich had been driving himself nearly out of his mind over saving “the monster and murderer,” his brother.

And this time her testimony does seem to ruin Mitya.

It was the same impetuous Katya who had once rushed to a young libertine in order to save her father; the very same Katya who, proud and chaste, had just sacrificed herself and her maiden’s honor before the whole public by telling of “Mitya’s noble conduct,” in order to soften at least somewhat the fate in store for him. So now, in just the same way, she again sacrificed herself, this time for another man, and perhaps only now, only that minute, did she feel and realize fully how dear this other man was to her!

Leave a comment

Share The Brothers Karamazov Slow Read

A certain new light suddenly poured over “the case.” Something sympathetic emerged in Mitya’s favor.… But when she had finished, he suddenly exclaimed in a sobbing voice, stretching his hands out to her: “Katya, why have you riuned me!”

Before the serious drama, the warm-up—and you have to love that Herzenstubbe, who’s been such a joke around the little town until now, turns out to be another Grigory, “stubborn as a mule” and a giver of kindness in the form of a bag of nuts to the lost barefoot boy Mitya was as a child.

And after the warm-up, the tease:

But the major effect in Mitya’s favor was produced by the testimony of Katerina Ivanovna, which I shall come to presently. And, generally, when the witnesses à décharge—that is, called by the defense—began to testify, fate seemed suddenly and even seriously to smile on Mitya and—what is most remarkable—to the surprise even of the defense itself.

Alyosha, of course, stands up for Mitya’s innocence and as he’s testifying realizes that he has seen evidence of the phantom amulet:

… during his last meeting with Mitya, in the evening, by the tree, on the road to the monastery, Mitya, hitting himself on the chest, “on the upper part of the chest,” repeated to him several times that he had a means of restoring his honor, and that this means was right there, right there, on his chest… “At the time I thought when he hit himself on the chest, that he was speaking of his heart,” Alyosha went on.

Katerina performs beautifully in Mitya’s favor,

and did not betray by a word, not by a single hint, that Mitya himself had suggested, through her sister, that they “send Katerina Ivanovna to him for the money.” She magnanimously concealed it, and was not ashamed to present it as if she, she herself, had gone running to a young officer, on her own impluse, hoping for something .. to beg him for money.

And yet when she is done he cries, “Now I am condemned!”

Our narrator dangles a new tease before us, “drawing near the catastrophe” that “indeed perhaps ruined Mitya,” but first brings on Grushenka, whose testimony helps undermine Rakitin’s credibility, but otherwise has nothing new to offer—the catastrophe still ahead of us.

Leave a comment

Share The Brothers Karamazov Slow Read

In our society, I remember, long before the trial, the question was asked with some surprise, especially by the ladies: “Can it be that the fatal decision in such a subtle, complex, and psychological case is to be turned over to a bunch of officials, and even to peasants?” and “What will some ordinary official make of it, not to mention a peasant?”

As our chatty narrator leads us into the crowded courtroom, the notoriety of the case and the interest it has aroused far beyond the little town stand in extreme contrast to the confined and intimate scene we just left. Now instead of a dark apartment and the hallucinatory dream of an isolated man we enter a carnival of opinon, of classes, of anticipations, of social views surrounding the key players in the drama of the court—unified evidently in their assumption of Mitya’s guilt.

It perhaps became clear to everyone from the very outset that this was not a controversial case at all, that there were no doubts here, that essentially there was no need for any debate, that the debate would take place only for the sake of form, and that the criminal was guilty, clearly guilty, utterly guilty. I even think that the ladies, one and all, who yearned with such impatience for the acquittal of an interesting defendant, were at the same time fully convinced of his complete guilt.

Even the skillful work of the defense attorney Fetyukovich in casting doubt on the testimony and character of the first “dangerous” witnesses will apparently not be enough to shake loose this conviction.

Amateurs and lawyers were filled with admiration, and only wondered, again, what great and ultimate purpose all this could serve, for, I repeat, everyone felt that the accusation, which was growing and becoming ever more tragic, was irrefutable. But they waited, seeing by the asurance of “the great magician” that he himself was calm: “such a man” would not have come from Petersburg for nothing, nor was he such as to go back with nothing.

But the trial has only just begun.

Leave a comment

Share The Brothers Karamazov Slow Read

“And do you think you’ve really decided? No, you haven’t decided yet. You’ll sit all night trying to decide whether to go or not. But you will go all the same, and you know you will go, you know yourself that no matter how much you try to decide it, the decision no longer depends on you. You will go because you don’t dare not to. Why you don’t dare—figure out for yourself, there’s a riddle for you!”

First the long version of the devil’s visit, and now this illuminating revision—the dream updated, expanded upon in the telling, to include both the news of Smerdyakov’s suicide and its consequences for Ivan, as if together with his devil he knew all this before. “And you did chase him away,” he tells Alyosha,

“he disappeared as soon as you came. I love your face, Alyosha. Did you know that I love your face? And he—is me. Alyosha, me myself. All that’s low, all that’s mean and contemptible in me!”

Alyosha, again on the scene to serve as our witness, offers possibly the most reliable perspective on all that is unfolding:

He was beginning to understand Ivan’s illness: “The torments of a proud decision, a deep conscience!” God, in whom he did not believe, and his truth were overcoming his heart, which still did not want to submit. … “Yes, … yes, with Smerdyakov dead, no one will believe Ivan’s testimony, but he will go and testify! …God will win!” he thought. “He will either rise into the light of truth, or … perish in hatred, taking revenge on himself and everyone for having served something he does not believe in,” Alyosha added bitterly, and again prayed for Ivan.

Leave a comment

Share The Brothers Karamazov Slow Read

“You are a lie, you are my illness, you are a ghost. Only I don’t know how to destroy you, and I see I’ll have to suffer through it for a while. You are my hallucination. You are the embodiment of myself, but of just one side of me … of my thoughts and feelings, but only the most vile and stupid of them. From that angle you could even be interesting to me, if I had time to bother with you…”

Like Siddhartha Gautama on the way to becoming Shakyamuni Buddha, Ivan recognizes the devil (as Siddhartha does Mara) as himself. Unlike Siddhartha, though, Ivan doesn’t know how to overcome him. When Siddhartha says to Mara, “I know who you are,” he touches the earth as his witness, a gesture of solidarity, the “Hosannah” Ivan and his devil are incapable of singing, and Mara is subdued.

And yet, what is it that Ivan’s devil wants to tempt him to, if it isn’t this very “Hosannah”?

“I will sow just a tiny seeed of faith in you, and from it an oak will grow—and such an oak that you, sitting in that oak, will want to join ‘the desert fathers and the blameless women’; because secretly you want that ver-ry, ver-ry much, you will dine on locusts, you will drag yourself to the desert to seek salvation!”

Or perhaps this is only an expression of Ivan’s greatest fear, that underneath all his worldly philosophizing there is only a yearning for faith.

He’s a funny old devil, in any case, as through him once again Dostoevsky plays his familiar themes, all while his visitor torments Ivan with his own rationalist arguments as if to drive him deeper into his madness, if for now only in a dream.

Leave a comment

Share The Brothers Karamazov Slow Read

“You know what: I’m afraid you’re a dream, a ghost sitting there in front of me.”

Framed by the “solitary drunk little peasant in a patched coat”—pushed into the snow by one Ivan as the chapter opens and rescued by another as it closes—the scene in between brings Ivan briefly to clarity: the mood he’s in as he first encounters the peasant and knocks him into the snow, absorbed as he is in his torments and utterly indifferent to the man’s freezing, has lifted completely by the time he stumbles on him unconscious and pulls him out, carries him to a nearby house, then to the police station, and sees that a doctor is called, all at his own expense.

What has come in between to return him to humanity is Smerdyakov’s complete confession and his own determination to testify, against Smerdyakov and against himself, at Mitya’s trial the next day.

“Doesn’t a man get tired of it?” Smerdyakov asks him.

“Here we are, just the two of us, so what’s the use of putting on such an act, trying to fool each other? Or do you still want to shift it all onto me, right to my face? You killed him, you are the main killer, and I was just your minion, your faithful servant Licharda, and I performed the deed according to your word.”

It takes hearing the details in full to persuade Ivan, but his growing determination becomes clear, and in that mood of clarity he rescues the peasant he earlier all but killed. And yet—

“Shouldn’t I go to the prosecutor immediately, right now, and tell him everything?” He resolved the question by turning towards his house again: “Tomorrow everything together!” he whispered to himself, and, strangely, almost all his joy, all his self-content vanished in a moment.

Leave a comment

Share The Brothers Karamazov Slow Read

“If it was not Dmitri but Smerdyakov who killed father, then, of course, I am solidary with him, because I put him up to it. Whether I did put him up to it—I don’t know yet. But if it was he who killed him, and not Dmitri, then, of course, I am a murderer, too.”

Haunted, worrying again over the meaning of his exchanges with Smerdyakov, Ivan returns to him for a second visit and leaves no closer to satisfaction.

“Listen, scoundrel: if I had been counting on anyone then, it would most certainly have been you and not Dmitri, and, I swear, I even did anticipate some sort of loathesomeness from you… at the time … I remember my impression.”

“And I, too, thought for a moment then that you were counting on me as well,” Smerdyakov grinned sarcastically, “so that you thereby gave yourself away even more to me, because if you were anticipating on me and you left all the same, it was just as if you told me thereby: you can kill my parent, I won’t prevent you.”

At every step Ivan’s uncertainties about the meaning of these conversations get entangled with his relationship with Katerina: in this instance, his confession of the reason for his agitation moves her to show him the fatal letter, the “mathematical proof” of Mitya’s guilt, and the letter-as-proof moves him to plan for Mitya’s escape (“Is it because in my soul I’m just as much a murderer?”) and also to hatred of his brother:

It was also remarkable that, though he felt he hated Mitya more and more every day, he understood at the same time that he hated him not because of Katya’s “reversions” to him, but precisely because he had killed their father!

The undercurrents of these entanglements—Ivan’s sense of guilt and denial of guilt, his jealousy or lack of jealousy over Katerina, Katerina’s dramatic vacillations back and forth, and the views of various onlookers about who loves whom and so on—remain in the darkness as we come back to the present action, when Ivan has just “broken with” Alyosha (end of Chapter 5) and left him at the crossroads, and makes the sudden decision to visit Smerdyakov for the third time.

Leave a comment

Share The Brothers Karamazov Slow Read

“I cannot act as I ought to here, break it off and tell her directly! … If I break it off with her now, she’ll take vengeance on me by destroying the scoundrel in court tomorrow, because she hates him and she knows she hates him. There are nothing but lies here, lie upon lie! But now, as long as I haven’t broken off with her, she still has hopes, and will not destroy the monster, knowing how much I want to get him out of trouble.”

In these chapters we come once again to Katerina Ivanovna and Smerdyakov, two characters we have mostly seen through the contradictory interpretations of others, even when we meet them directly in action. Both key figures in Ivan’s suffering, appearing now, one after the other, they illuminate his sense of guilt—

…asking himself constantly why, on his last night in Fyodor Pavlovich’s house, before his departure, he had gone out silently to the stairs, like a thief, and listened for what his father was doing down below. Why had he recalled it later with such revulsion, why had he suddenly felt such anguish the next morning on the road, why had he said to himself on reaching Moscow: “I am a scoundrel”?

—a sense of guilt that Alyosha recognizes, no matter how vehemently Ivan denies it with his insistence on Mitya as the murderer:

“You’ve accused yourself and confessed to yourself that you and you alone are the murderer. But it was not you who killed him, you are mistaken, the murderer was not you, do you hear, it was not you! God has sent me to tell you that.”

Many (many!) years ago, for a paper in a philosophy class on phenomenology, I analyzed the progression of Ivan’s conversations with Smerdyakov, from the beginning to those still ahead, to illustrate the categories of Sartre’s concept of bad faith, or self-deception, in Being and Time.

The paper doesn’t exist anymore, but the memory of it is more vivid than of anything else I wrote in college, and two things strike me about it today—first, and again, that the details of this progression are so subtly and carefully drawn that they offer a vivid taxonomy of self-deceptions, and second, a question for my very young self—why did I not recognize or consider the same bad faith at work in Ivan’s relations with Katerina, the denied sense of guilt undermining all possibility of truth between them?

… when Ivan Fyodorovich…. leaving Katerina Ivanovna’s with Alyosha at night, said to him: “But I don’t fancy her,” he was lying terribly at that moment: he loved her madly, though it was true that at times he also hated her so much that he could even have killed her. Many causes came together here: all shaken by what had happened with Mitya…

Leave a comment

Share The Brothers Karamazov Slow Read

“Brother, in these past two months I’ve sensed a new man in me, a new man has arisen in me! He was shut up inside me, but if it weren’t for this thunderbolt, he never would have appeared. Frightening! What do I care if I spend twenty years pounding out iron ore in the mines, I’m not afraid of that at all, but I’m afraid of something else now: that this risen man not depart from me! Even there, in the mines, underground, you can find a human heart in the convict and murderer standing next to you. … You can revive and resurrect the frozen heart in this convict … you can revive an angel, resurrect a hero! And there are many of them, there are hundreds, and we’re all guilty for them!… Because everyone is guilty for everyone else.”

Mitya’s many raptures make this chapter so rich that it demands rereading. Mitya has often seemed the forgotten brother, especially when the narrator has told us from the beginning that Alyosha is his hero, and when readings of the novel as philosophy tend to focus on Ivan.

This time, for me, Mitya’s evocations of the “hymn” all but overwhelm the other important elements at work in this chapter: his debates with Rakitin and Ivan, his own philosophical questioning, Dostoevsky’s barbs at medicine, law, and psychology, and the various additions to the plot and subplots—Mitya’s perspective on Madame Khokhlakov and her suitors (“I really could kiss the foolish woman for turning him out!”); his reluctant revelation of Ivan’s insistence on his escape (and another interesting aside on escape to America); his confidence that Ivan believes he’s guilty and his insecurity over Alyosha’s belief in his innocence—until finally his parting words to Alyosha: “Love Ivan!”

And on to Ivan we go.

Leave a comment

Share The Brothers Karamazov Slow Read

She was not really upset, but somehow all in pieces.

Ah! Madame Khokhlakov and Lise—for a heavy dose of digressive gossip and prophecy from the one and self-dramatization and confessional revelation from the other.

Dostoevsky does seem to use Madame Khokhlakov to poke fun at all the favorite targets he will critique more seriously through other characters—here, the law courts and legal profession, doctors and modern medicine (all tainted by Europeanism, no doubt):

“And moreover, who isn’t in a fit of passion these days—you, me, we’re all in a fit of passion, there are so many examples: a man sits singing some old song, and suddenly something annoys him, he takes out a gun and shoots whoever happens to be there, and then they all forgive him. I read it recently, and all the doctors confirmed it. The doctors confirm nowadays, they confirm everything.”

At the same time he gives her the voice of prediction, and some of her predictions may come to pass, whether in this novel or the novel to come:

“This trial, this wild act, and then everyone goes to Siberia, others get married, and it all happens so quickly, so quickly, and everything is changing, and in the end there’s nothing, everyone is old and has one foot in the grave… This Katya… now she’ll follow your one brother to Siberia, and your other brother will follow her and live in the next town, and they’ll all torment one another.”

And when we go to Lise:

“I wanted to tell you a wish of mine. I want someone to torment me, to marry me and then torment me, deceive me, leave me and go away. I don’t want to be happy! ... I want disorder. I keep wanting to set fire to the house. I imagine how I’ll sneak up and set fire to it on the sly, it must be on the sly. They’ll try to put it out, but it will go on burning. And I’ll know and say nothing.

In past readings I’ve understood Lise’s confessional revelations, especially the worst of them—her delight in the cruelty of the crucifixion she claims to have read about—as adolescent exaggerations that she will outgrow as she matures and marries Alyosha and so on (like Natasha with Pierre)—but apparently this wasn’t Dostoevsky’s intention for her at all.

“There are moments when people love crime,” Alyosha said pensively.

“Yes, yes! … they love it, they all love it, and love it always, not just at ‘moments.’ You know, it’s as if at some point they all agreed to lie about it, and have been lying about it ever since. They all say they hate what’s bad, but secretly they all love it. … Listen, your brother is on trial now for killing his father, and they all love it that he killed his father… Everyone says it’s terrible, but secretly they all love it terribly. I’m the first to love it.”

If anything, Lise’s pleasure in wanting to ruin herself, in teasing the room full of devils in her dream, in eating pineapple compote in the face of torture, predicts instead a tormented and tormenting spirit that may grow rather than diminish. One account of the future novel has Alyosha unhappily married to her, leaving her (or left or possibly widowed), and ending up with Grushenka—whatever “with” might mean in this context.

Leave a comment

Share The Brothers Karamazov Slow Read

“They’re going to judge him tomorrow! Tell me, how are they going to judge him there? It was the lackey who killed him, the lackey! Lord! Can it be that they’ll condemn him instead of the lackey, and no one will stand up for him?”

As we return to the main plot, once again rushing around with Alyosha from household to household and character to character, we catch up with events along the way and encounter new configurations among the people involved in Mitya’s fate.

We are reminded of Alyosha’s appreciation of Grushenka—

Her face was greatly changed, she had become thin and sallow…. But in Alyosha’s opinion her face had become even more attractive, as it were, and he loved meeting her eyes when he entered her room. Something firm and aware seemed to have settled in her eyes. Some spiritual turnabout told in her; a certain steadfast, humble, but good and irrevocable resolution appeared.

And we learn that he has become her confidant—she “opened her heart to him alone and constantly asked his advice; and sometimes he was utterly unable to tell her anything.”

We see her at her familiar best and worst, generous and compassionate one moment, jealous and full of fears, “sullen and spiteful,” the next, and Mitya as she describes him seems to be much the same, volatile, jealous, anxious, cheerful, and so on, and also withholding.

We learn that the lawyer, hired by Ivan, Katerina, and Alyosha, has taken the case “for the sake of glory,” and has “already formed a definite opinion,” and that the upper class doctor of the previous chapter has also come for the trial:

“As an expert. They want to establish that my brother is crazy and killed in a fit of madness, not knowing what he was doing,” Alyosha smiled quietly, “only my brother won’t agree to it.”

“Ah, but it would be true, if he were the murderer!” Grushenka exclaimed. “He was crazy then, completely crazy, and it’s I who am to blame, base creature that I am! Only he didn’t kill him, he didn’t!”

And we are told of a secret—that Katerina, Ivan, and Mitya have a secret they don’t want Grushenka or Alyosha to know.

“He actually said: don’t tell him. It’s you he’s most afraid of—Mitya, I mean. Because there’s a secret here, he himself said there’s a secret…”

Leave a comment

Share The Brothers Karamazov Slow Read

“Oh, how I curse myself for not coming before,” Kolya muttered, crying and no longer embarrassed to be crying.

So many tiny indications of what’s to come in these two chapters, along with observations relevant to our own present moment:

With a devil to look forward to in chapters ahead, these words from Alyosha to Kolya also seem to speak to our image conscious culture:

“What does it matter how many times a man is or seems to be ridiculous? Besides, nowadays almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it … It’s almost a madness. The devil has incarnated himself in this vanity and crept into a whole generation—precisely the devil.”

Another aside, this one from Kolya, seems oddly relevant to this specific day — “No Kings,” March 28, 2026 — and also reminds me of how striking it was when I first read this novel (in 1965 or so) to encounter the idea of “America” as the place to flee to rather than from:

“I also think, for example, that to flee the fatherland for America is a base thing, worse than base—it’s foolish. Why go to America, if one can also be of much use to mankind here? Precisely now. There’s a whole mass of fruitful activity.”

Along with possible echoes of Ivan, there are also premonitions of the second Karamazov novel when Kolya asserts to Alyosha:

“I’m not against Christ. He was a very humane person, and if he was living in our time, he would go straight to join the revolutionaries, and perhaps would play a prominent part … It’s even certain he would.”

And with all this, we also have Kolya’s redemption in the opening of his heart.

Leave a comment

Share The Brothers Karamazov Slow Read