Amazing Journey

And so at last I have come to the end of The Brothers Karamazov.  What a long strange trip it's been.  The organizing principles by and large continued to escape me through to the very end.  What is the book even about?  I know now what happened in it, but what's the significance of those events?  What is the basis of their claim to be not just what happened in a story, but what happens; to be a type, an emblem, of the sort of thing that happens everywhere all the time?

I don't know; it's too big to summarize, too fragmented to piece together. Let's just examine an interesting-looking fragment or two and then move along. This is a race we're running. The following discussion will no doubt contain what are unwisely dubbed spoilers.

Near the end of Karamazov, Dmitri is convicted for the murder of his father, a crime which the reader is by now quite certain was committed by his father's valet (or perhaps illegitimate son) Smerdyakov, dead at that point by his own hand. The case against and then for him are summed in two lengthy closing arguments. Why Dostoevsky bothers to devote so much time to setting forth, in such copious detail, the errors and misunderstandings of the court officials may be something like the following: both the prosecuting and the defending attorneys link the fate of the defendant Dmitri to the moral destiny of the Russian nation, and that moral destiny of the nation is in turn a battleground between piety and atheism, tradition and progress, mysticism and reason. So that even the novel (perhaps this collaboration with those looking for profundity and significance is a mark of the "great novelist," so called?) gets busy explaining how what happened is just what happens.

The novel ends with a speech given by Dmitri's devout and benevolent brother Alyosha to a group of schoolboys after the funeral of one of their playmates, Ilusha (the name is a diminutive of Ilya, incidentally). Alyosha says that Ilusha's example will live on in all their hearts, and in times to come, when the boys, less innocent and more adult, may be struggling with the pressures of life, perhaps Ilusha's memory will arise before them and give them some aid in remaining uncorrupted, unbroken; or, if the question for them is no longer one of remaining, then it may aid them in regaining their moral footing and correcting the course of their lives. Does that strike anyone else as Dostoevsky's mission statement? The novel, once read, lingers as a memory that may aid us in the project of becoming good people.

This is about to get a little glib and superficial, but: when Dostoevsky's characters ruminate on the destiny of Russia, be that destiny high or low, noble or not, it can be difficult not to project onto Dostoevsky knowledge which he, writing almost four decades before the Communist Revolution, could not have possessed, of the actual Russia's actual fate. No, that's not quite right; it would be more apt to say that many of the topics Dostoevsky undertakes to discuss appear, to my admittedly scanty and piecemeal knowledge, to have remained pertinent through the period of the Revolution (and of course some of them persist to the present day, nor in Russia alone). So that the effect is as though you've been reading something prophetic: as though Dostoevsky, however indefinitely, foresaw a coming cataclysm, and sought to warn people: to give them an example, a memory, that would rise in their minds at the relevant moment of temptation and steer them back toward wisdom and virtue. Wow. (That it obviously didn't work is not a mark against Dostoevsky since prophetic warnings are usually ignored.)

I'm not yet sure what I'll read next. Something radically briefer. I'll go survey my bookshelf. Until next time.