The Sequel

Some afterthoughts

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?

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