The Light of “The Brothers Karamazov”
What is the light in “The Brothers Karamazov”?
It is the voices. “The Brothers Karamazov” is a novel of voices. Men, women, young, old, rich, poor, foolish, wise: all are allowed to make themselves heard in their own right—all speak with their own voice. And in each individual voice there are echoes of other voices, contemporary or past, written or oral, political or philosophical, from the Bible or from newspaper articles, rumors about town, memories of someone long dead. Everyone in the novel speaks from their own self, their specific and unique place, some of them utterly unforgettable in their magnificent individuality, but they do so using the same language. And, if some of the characters in “The Brothers Karamazov” rank all the way up there with Shakespeare’s creations, still this is not a work dominated by a single protagonist, the way Hamlet is Hamlet’s play, or Othello is Othello’s. It is the opposite: “The Brothers Karamazov” is a collective novel—it is about the profusion of voices, how they are intertwined and, though they themselves are unable to see it, how they form one whole, one connection, one chorus.
This overarching stylistic feature finds an explicit echo in two of the voices, those of the elder Zosima and of Alyosha, whose shared belief that we are all responsible for all, and that we are all guilty before all, runs as a mantra throughout the novel. That is the hope of the novel, the utopia of the novel—but not its reality. “Mama, do not weep,” says Zosima’s young brother as he lays dying, “life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we do not want to know it, and if we did want to know it, tomorrow there would be paradise the world over.” In another passage, a murderer tells Zosima, “And as for each man being guilty before all and for all, besides his own sins, your reasoning about that is quite correct, and it is surprising that you could suddenly embrace this thought so fully. And indeed it is true that when people understand this thought, the Kingdom of Heaven will come to them, no longer in a dream but in reality.”
In other words, the Kingdom of Heaven is nothing other than an unrealized possibility: we are merely a realization away from Paradise.
So why don’t we take that step? What is it that hinders us?
This is what “The Brothers Karamazov” is about. The novel plucks all its ideas down from the heaven of abstractions and forces them into the human realm, based on the insight that they exist only there, in human beings made of flesh and blood. As Dostoyevsky once wrote, “Man is a mystery . . .If you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.” In his novelistic universe, human beings are governed by emotions, driven by desire, unpredictable, imperfect, fallible—but also possessed of enormous power. In “The Brothers Karamazov,” he has brought together four very different young men, with very different qualities, in one house. It is a house filled with hatred. The father, Fyodor Karamazov, is a grasping, lecherous, deceitful, and shameless widower. He has always neglected his sons; he has never cared about them, except when there was something to be gained by it. He is the father from hell. Each son is affiliated with a social institution—in the case of the eldest, Dmitri, immensely proud and of a violent temper, it is the military; for the middle one, Ivan, who is rational, cold, and analytical, it is the university; while for the youngest, Alyosha, who is warm, considerate, always accepting, it is the church. In addition, there is the servant Smerdyakov, presumed to be the illegitimate child of Fyodor and the intellectually disabled Lizaveta, nicknamed Stinking Lizaveta.
