notes on the brothers karamazov

Chuck Palahniuk once wrote: “To begin a new novel, I look for the biggest problem in my life that I can’t solve or tolerate. Something that drives me nuts, but I can’t fix. Then I find a metaphor that allows me to explore the problem, exaggerating and expanding it beyond reason. I build it up to the worst scenario possible and then find a way to solve it.” For Dostoyevsky, that problem that drove his novels was no less than all of human suffering. In his own life, he suffered plenty. He was an epileptic; his mother died of tuberculosis when he was 17; he spent four years in a Siberian labor camp; he developed a gambling addiction; two of his children died. Of his first marriage, he wrote: "Because of her strange, suspicious and fantastic character, we were definitely not happy together, but we could not stop loving each other; and the more unhappy we were, the more attached to each other we became.” His second marriage was happy, but during their honeymoon he was so destitute his young stenographer wife had to sell her belongings to pay for their trip; at one point, she reportedly had to pawn her own underwear.

His novels are deeply haunted by pain. James Wood, in one of the best lectures I’ve ever listened to, says:

Dostoevsky always stressed the aesthetic principle in our response to God, and found more moving than words the image of Christ. For his 58th birthday, his wife gave him a reproduction of Rafael’s Sistine Madonna. “How many times,” she wrote, “have I found him in his study in front of that great picture, in such deep contemplation that he did not hear me coming in?” Seeing suffering, being made to witness it, is not of course a solution to suffering. But perhaps, it’s the only comprehension we can really possess. A contemporary philosopher, Kenneth Surin, ends his book on the problem of evil by saying that suffering is indeed a theological mystery. So, he essentially ends with the incomprehensibility theory. That it is indeed a theological mystery, and that all we can do is let it exist as an interruption. That’s the word he italicized. As an interruption in our sense of divine order and goodness. When I first read this book, years ago, I thought Surin’s conclusion little more than postmodern relaxation, a kind of preciousness in which Surin had managed to find a convenient metaphorical blanket for the elephant in the room. But I’m not so sure, now, and find the idea of interruption, and the kind of interruption provided by Dostoevsky in novels, a useful way of addressing these issues.

Interruption, first of all, in the way that I interrupted my lecture to read from the novel. The interruption that the representation of pain brings to our largely unbroken existences. But there’s also the interruption that Dostoevsky’s peculiarly open-ended novels provide. Bakhtin famously called this the dialogical principle, by which he meant the way in which ideas in Dostoyevsky circulate alongside other ideas, and none seems to be privileged by the form of the novel. “For Dostoyevsky,” wrote Bakhtin, “There are no ideas, no thoughts, no positions, which belong to no one-- which exist in themselves. All ideas are attached to characters, who then warp and modify them. And this applies as freely to obviously good ideas, like the preaching of the monk Zosima in the Brothers Karamazov, who says we must love each other, as it does to the obviously bad ideas, like Raskolnikov’s utilitarian nihilism.

We might write novels to work out problems in our own life, like Palahniuk says. But novels are about bearing witness to something we fundamentally cannot solve, which is to say the inexplicability and incomprehensibility of human life. From George Steiner’s Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky:

Belinsky stated that the question of the existence of God was the final and all-determining focus of Russian thought. As Merezhkovsky remarked, the problem of God and of His nature had “absorbed the whole Russian people from the Judaizers of the fifteenth century to the present day.” The iconography of the Messiah and the eschatology of Revelation gave to political debate a bizarre and feverish resonance. The shadow of millennial expectations lay across a stifled culture. In all Russian political thinking—in the pronouncements of Chaadaev, Kireevsky, Nechaiev, Tkachev, Belinsky, Pissarev, Constantine Leontiev, Soloviev, and Fedorov—the kingdom of God had moved terribly close to the declining kingdom of man. The Russian mind was, literally, God-haunted … Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov are, if you will, fictions and poems of the mind, but central to their purpose is what Berdiaev has called the “quest after the salvation of humanity.”

The Brothers Karamazov is a chronicle of an unhappy family, but is also a novel about belief and disbelief, the necessity and impossibility of God, the“logical claustrophobia of Christian commitment” as a response to human suffering. The characters are incredibly vivid. Dmitri, chaotic, violently passionate, wildly loving. Ivan, the charismatic atheist who is so close to being a believer. Grushenka, a Mary Magdalene character if I’ve seen one, opaque, vindictive, charming and damaged with her swollen lower lip, her lovely body that will run to fat before she’s 30. Katerina Ivanovna, proud and unbending. Alyosha, saintly, beatific and naive.

From some notes I wrote after reading War and Peace:

Tolstoy’s work is powerfully animated by a precise awareness of the universality of human experience—he can illustrate the ways we are different because of his deep sense of how we are alike. His writing feels nearly Biblical to me—one almost has the impression that a prophet has descended to impart tales of human folly and wisdom. And the topics that Tolstoy instructs us on, especially in War and Peace, are not much less ambitious than what you’d expect of a religious text—good and evil, altruism and greed, freedom and necessity, the nature of romantic and familial love.

War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov are books of incredible scale. One way of looking at it is that you and I, dear reader, do not live in God-haunted 19th century Russia, but the problems of contemporary America do not seem any less immediate, vivid, religious in nature. In fact, like many others, I've lately been hyperfixated on the idea that our problems are astonishingly religious in nature. Meghan O’Gieblyn writes in Interior States (her essay on attention is currently circulating on X, and I highly recommend reading… well, every other essay she’s ever written):

William James once noted that “the most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing.” In other words, even when a person outwardly denounces a long-standing belief, the architecture of the idea persists and can come to be inhabited by other things. This is as true of cultures as it is of individuals. Some of the essays in this collection examine the ways in which our increasingly secular landscape is still imprinted with the legacy of Christianity. The testimony, as a narrative form, endures in the rooms of twelve-step programs and in contemporary writing about motherhood, which often takes the form of conversion narrative. Meanwhile, the faith’s epic story of messianic redemption lives on in the utopic visions of transhumanism and in liberalism’s endless arc of progress.

The mood in the labs is fever-pitched and overtly eschatological. But as a society, we no longer seem to write novels explicitly about God, or at least not since Gilead. I’ve been thinking about James Wood all week and why it is that I was pretty much disinterested in literary criticism until I read him. Like Meghan O’Gieblyn, he grew up evangelical; this interview describes him as “a writer for whom criticism is a way of proselytising for literature.” But he sees literature as inherently an earthly form, focused on our absurdities and failings. It is possible to write a mystical novel (he categorizes Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Moby Dick as such) but it is hard to write a Christian novel, perhaps because “narrative is inherently secular.”

I agree with Wood that the most vivid, poignant character in the Brothers Karamazov is Ivan, the atheist who cannot reconcile the existence of God with the existence of children suffering.

The Russian philosopher Lev Shestov, for instance, thought that Dostoevsky, for all his orthodoxy, was so corroded by doubt that when he came to imagine the doubter Ivan, he couldn’t help giving him a vitality and appeal far beyond the saintly and bland Alyosha. Those of Shestov’s mind think that even if the novel demonstrates that atheism is finally a murderous idea, because it kills old Fyodor Karamazov, religion is so damaged by Ivan’s onslaught that it cannot mount a proper reply.

In real life, months before Dostoyevsky started writing The Brothers Karamazov his two-year-old son Alyosha died following an epileptic fit. Knausgaard:

Dostoyevsky “loved Lyosha somehow in a very special way, with an almost morbid love, as if sensing that he would not have him for long,” Anna wrote later. When his son stopped breathing, Dostoyevsky “kissed him, made the sign of the cross over him three times,” and broke down in tears. He was crushed with grief, Anna wrote, and with guilt—his son had inherited epilepsy from him. Outwardly, however, he was soon calm and collected; she was the one who wept and wept. Gradually, she grew worried that his suppression of grief would have a negative impact on his already fragile health, and she suggested that he visit the Optina Pustyn monastery with a young friend, the theological wunderkind Vladimir Solovyov. There they met the elder of the monastery—the starets—Ambrose. “Weep and be not consoled, but weep,” he said to Dostoyevsky.

What happened to Dostoyevsky is profoundly visible in the novel: The Brothers Karamazov is a book written by a man who has experienced unbearable suffering, and struggles to reconcile it as a profound believer. Dmitri’s passion is Dostoyevsky’s passion; Ivan’s torment is Dostoyevsky’s torment, just as Alyosha’s goodness is his conception of goodness. The Brother Karamazov is suffused with pain, but I agree with Knausgaard that the kiss that Alyosha gives Ivan at the end of the Grand Inquisitor chapter (the best chapter in the book, and as has been argued, one of the best chapters in any book anywhere) feels like the heart of the novel. Atheism debates about ideas. But faith is not an idea but an act.

The Wood lecture I quoted above continues by elaborating on this point:

Perhaps all narrative, indeed, corrugates dogma. Puts truths in motion. Narratives’ continuousness, if you think about it-- this happened, and then that happened, and then that happened--is secular rather than religious, because it is endless in the way life is, rather than eternal in the way religion promises. In other words, like life, narrative only seems endless. It’s bottomless rather than circular. But eternity, religious eternity, stops time by expanding it into infinity, and making a circularity of it. Time will come to an end, we are doctrinally instructed, when the apocalypse comes.

Viewed that way, AI could not be a religious movement if it was not a story about the apocalypse, about time coming to an end. I wonder if there’s a way in which the most pro-literature thing you can do is to believe in narrative, which is to say: to believe that time will continue.