The Massachusettes Review, Inc.

The Sons Karamazov: Dostoevsky's Characters as Freudian Transformations

Author(s): Neal Bruss
Source: The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Spring, 1986), pp. 40-67
Published by: The Massachusettes Review, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25089714
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Neal Bruss
The Sons Karamazov:
Dostoevsky's
Characters
as
Freudian Transformations
IN
"Dostoevsky
and Parricide"
(1928), Sigmund
Freud inter
preted Dostoevsky's epileptoid
seizures as "a
self-punishment
for a
death wish
against
a
hated father:"1
The illness first came over
him while he was still a
boy,
in the form
of a
sudden,
groundless melancholy,
a
feeling,
as he later told his
friend
Soloviev,
as
though
he were
going
to die on the
spot.
And
there in fact followed a state
exactly
similar to
real death. His
brother
Andrey
tells us
that
even when he was
quite young Fyodor
used to leave little notes about before he went to
sleep, saying
that he
was
afraid he
might
fall into this death-like
sleep during
the
night
and therefore
begged
that his burial should be
postponed
for five
days. (182)
Deathlike
attacks,
Freud
writes,
"signify
an
identification with a
dead
person
...
or
with someone who is still alive and whom the
subject
wishes
dead," and,
for a
boy, "usually...
the attack
(which
is termed
hysterical)
is thus a
self-punishment
for a
death-wish
against
a hated father"
(182-183).
The moment of
"supreme
bliss"
before the attack
"may
be a record of the
triumph
and sense of
liberation felt
on
hearing
the news of the
death,
to be followed
immediately by
an
all the more cruel
punishment" (186).
That
Dostoevsky
did not have attacks in Siberia
suggested
to Freud that
"he
accepted
the undeserved
punishment
at the hands of the Little
Father,
the
Tsar,
as a substitute for the
punishment
he deserved for
his sin
against
his real father"
(186).
According
to Freud's editor
James Strachey (175-176),
Freud
began writing
this
essay
to be an introduction to a
supplement
volume of drafts and
source
studies for the standard German
translation of The Brothers Karamazov. But when Theodore Reik
was
sued for
malpractice, Strachey
states,
Freud
put
the
project
aside to write The
Question of Lay Analysis
and had
difficulty
40
The Sons Karamazov
regaining
interest in it. Freud's
completed essay
discusses The
Brothers Karamazov for little
more than a
page. (Instead,
the
essay
concludes with a
five-page
discussion of a
story by
Freud's
con
temporary
Stefan
Zweig,
who had written a
book about Dos
toevsky.
The
story, "Four-and-Twenty-Hours
in a
Woman's
Life,"
deals with
a
young
man addicted like
Dostoevsky
to
gambling.)
"Dostoevsky
and Parricide" is
one of four occasions in the
6,800
pages
of Freud's
writings
in which he uses his
technique
of inter
preting by grammatical
transformation.2 So rare and
powerful
a
device is the transformation that its
appearance
in the
Dostoevsky
piece
must be considered
portentous?and suggestive
of a
way
to
expand
Freud's discussion of the novel.
Under the transformational
technique,
Freud
represented
a
repressed thought
as an
underlying
clause
or
sentence,
introduced
the
ordinary negative
as
"the hall-mark of
repression,"3
and then
derived
explicit symptoms
from the clause
by negating
one or
another of its
parts.
Freud
represented Dostoevsky's underlying
parricidal
wish as "'You wanted
to kill
your
father in order to be
your
father
yourself!'"
His first
step
uses
the
negative
to
replace
the
clause's
optative
verb with the
present
indicative: "'Now
you
are
your father,
but a
dead father.'" A second
step
shifts the father into
the role of active
agent,
and the son into the
object
of
punishment:
"'Now
your
father is
killing you'" (185).
The transformational
analysis
in
"Dostoevsky
and Parricide" is
idiosyncratic
in that it describes
only
one
symptom,
the seizures. In
its other three
appearances,
the transformation
generates
full
arrays
of
symptoms,
and thus resembles a
grammatical paradigm
or
logical square
of
opposition?not,
as in the
Dostoevsky analy
sis,
a
single
derivation
or
syllogism.
The
implication,
then,
is that the
Dostoevsky essay
should also
have
yielded
an
array
of
symptom-types?that
the
large part
of the
Dostoevsky array
is
missing.
Given that the Karamazov
project
was
Freud's occasion for
writing
and that the novel received scant
treatment in the finished
essay,
there is
justification
for
seeking
the
rest of the transformational
array
in the novel.
Freud used the transformation to
explain symptoms
of a
specific
type: pathological
resolutions of conflicts
over
infantile desires. He
used it to show exhibitionism and
voyeurism
to be outcomes of a
prohibition against masturbatory "looking
at one's own
organ,"
and the common
phantasies
of
paranoia
and of "a child
being
beaten" to
be distorted
representations
of
impermissible
love. He
41
The Massachusetts Review
used it to
interpret
the
beating-phantasies
and
Dostoevsky's
seiz
ures as self-attacks transformed from
aggressive impulses,
impulses.
The
transformation, then,
was not a
general-purpose interpre
tive device like
displacement
or
symbolism.
Freud used it to chart
forcible deflections of infantile
impulses
into roles of
exaggerated
activity
or
passivity. (Indeed,
the
grammatical passive
transforma
tion
figures
in all of these
analyses.)
In other
words,
Freud used the
transformation to
interpret
unsuccessful outcomes of the
Oedipal
crisis?understood not in the terms of the
predicament
of the
family triangle
but in terms of its outcome: the child's
develop
ment,
with his
parents' help,
of a
healthy psychical
mechanism?
ego
and
superego?to
mediate his desires and furnish him with an
identity.
That Freud
applied
the transformation to
interpret
unsuccessful
versions of
ego
formation would accord with a
passing
remark in a
discussion of
therapeutic technique by
the
psychoanalyst Jan
Frank,
that
"Dostoevsky,
in the triad of
Dmitry, Alyosha,
and
Ivan,
created illustrative
examples
of
ego styles."4
If the
ego
is that
component
of the
psyche
which mediates between
impulses,
con
science and
ordinary reality, "ego style"
would
surely
be reflected
in the sons' actions in the
novel,
including
their
"styles"
of
coping
with their father.
In that
page
of
"Dostoevsky
and Parricide"
on
which Freud did
discuss the
novel,
he stated that "all of the
brothers, except
the
contrasted
figure
of
Alyosha,
are
equally guilty"
of the murder of
their
thoughtless, dissipated
father. In the
novel,
guilt
for the
parricide
is shifted
progressively
from one brother to the next. And
every
one
of the brothers
(including
the "contrasted"
Alyosha,
whose second
father,
the elder
Zossima,
dies
naturally)
suffers
a
seizure
or a feverish delirium
provoked by Fyodor
Karamazov
or
the
thought
of
murdering
him.
If Freud treated
Dostoevsky's
seizure
as one transformation of
a
parricidal
wish,
and if he
implicitly placed Dostoevsky
in a series
with the
sons
Karamazov
as
guilty
of
parricide,
then the sons
Karamazov
might
be the unstated members of Freud's transforma
tional series in
"Dostoevsky
and Parricide." In other
words,
the
missing
transformational variants
may
be discovered
to have been
formulated
by Dostoevsky
himself,
in the
language
of fictional
narrative rather than
psychoanalysis?as
the Karamazov
sons.
Moreover,
as we shall
see,
the series which
Dostoevsky
and the
42
The Sons Karamazov
Karamazov
sons
occupy
cannot be
completed (either
in
respect
to
the novel
or in terms of the
psychodynamic
it
explores)
without
another fitful
son with a
father-problem:
little
Ilyusha Snegiryov,
who tries to be his
incompetent
humiliated father's
champion.
Freud
states,
"It can
scarcely
be
owing
to
chance that three of the
masterpieces
of the literature of all time?the
Oedipus
Rex of
Sophocles, Shakespeare's
Ham let and
Dostoevsky's
The Brother's
Karamazov?should all deal with the same
subject, parricide"
(188).
Freud wrote in The
Interpretation of
Dreams that Hamlet
differs from
Oedipus
in that
inHamlet,
"the child's wishful
phan
tasy_remains repressed."5
The Brothers Karamazov differs from
Hamlet and
Oedipus
on a
different
parameter,
in the freakishness
of the
father,
and its
disruptive
effects
on
the
development
of the
sons.
If the
parricide
and its
prosecution comprise
the novel's
plot,
the
character-formation of the
sons is its
psychological
context. The
Karamazov brothers are
bracketed
by
two
larger groups
of sons:
monks and
schoolboys.
Both
groups
are
unsettled
by problems
created
by
the absence or
deficiencies of fathers. When Zossima dies
and his
body
releases "the odour of
corruption,"
the monks "who
loved the late elder and had
accepted
the institution of elders with
devout obedience
suddenly
became
terribly frightened
of some
thing
and,
when
they
met,
exchanged
timid
glances
with
one
another."6 Father
Ferapont emerges
from his hut to cast out
devils,
challenging
the institution of elders with the rule of asceticism. As
for the
schoolboys, they
become embroiled in a
rock war
against
their smallest
member,
Ilyusha,
when he refuses to
accept
their
teasing
about his father's humiliation
by Dmitry
Karamazov.
Thus,
at the
opening
of the
novel, every
member of either
group
is vexed with a
crisis of
morality
and
loyalty.
The result is
that,
with the
Karamazovs,
virtually every
male character
spends
much
of the novel in a state of emotional turmoil induced
by
fathers.
Standard
Oedipal theory assigns
the father the role of
giving
the
son a
code of
conduct,
in return for the son
circumscribing
his
desires. But these fathers have failed their sons?Zossima
by
leav
ing
behind "so
great
and immediate an
expectation
of
something
miraculous"
(384); Ferapont
for
rising
as another father's
rival;
Ilyusha's
father,
Snegiryov,
for
accepting
work as
Fyodor's agent
against
his son
Dmitry;
and
perhaps Kolya
Krasotkin's dead father
for
leaving
his son to
develop
into the brat whose diffidence would
lead to the
bullying
of
Ilyusha.
43
The Massachusetts Review
No father arises to set these conflicts
straight: Alyosha
Kara
mazov does his best with the
schoolboys,
but in the
speech
which
ends the
novel,
he admits
uncertainty
about what the
boys
will
become.
Dostoevsky's implication
is that
although
the focus of the
novel is
on
the
Karamazovs, every monk, every
one
of the school
boys,
would constitute
a
"transformation" of dire
Oedipalization,
had
Dostoevsky
told that
story. Dostoevsky provides just enough
description
of the willfulness of the
boy
Zossima and of
Kolya
to
represent
a
subgroup
of
Oedipal
transformations at the
periphery
of the
novel,
that of
sons
whose fathers died
early
in their child
hoods. The least conflicted solution to a
defective father is not a
Karamazov's but
Ilyusha's:
he tries to
compensate
for his father's
inadequacy by taking
upon
himself the role of his father's cham
pion, generating
himself the
integrity
that a
father should
provide,
in the name of his father.
The
schoolboys
are at the
age
when
they
are
capable
of their first
independent activity
outside their homes?when
they
are emo
tionally
distant from their
mothers,
whom
they
have
replaced
with
their
peers.
Whether he is
waiting
for a
train between the tracks
on
a
dare,
condescending
to
the
peasants,
or
spurning
and
comforting
Ilyusha, Kolya magnetizes
the
schoolboys. (Smurov's parents
for
bid him from
playing
with
Kolya,
but he does
anyway
[2: 615].)
As for the mothers Karamazov:
Adelaida,
Dmitry's
mother,
quarreled
with her
husband,
ran
away
from
Fyodor
with a semi
narian and died in a
garret. Sophia,
mother of Ivan and
Alyosha,
eloped
with
Fyodor,
died when Ivan
was seven and
Alyosha
three.
Smerdyakov's
mother,
the
holy
innocent
Stinking
Lizaveta,
whom
Karamazov
apparently
seduced
on a dare from his
drinking
com
panions, jumped
his fence nine months
later,
broke into his bath
house,
gave
birth to
Smerdyakoy
and died.
Dostoevsky
hints
obtrusively
that he does not intend the devel
opmental probings
in his novel to
apply
to the women
characters.
One
type
of hint is bewilderment. On the second
page
the narrator
describes
as
"enigmatic"
the
passion
of
a
young
woman who
drowned herself in a river
over a man whom she could have
married "because she wanted to be like
Shakespeare's Ophelia" (4).
When
Alyosha
meets Grushenka and
Katerina,
he is
"greatly
astonished"
by
Katerina's
conflicting personality
traits, and,
atone
point,
that the two rivals "seemed
to be in love"
(222, 174).
Lise Kokhlakov is the
daughter
whose
psychology
seems most
44
The Sons Karamazov
like the sons'. Ivan
empathizes
with her
obtrusive,
obsessive
thoughts
of
enjoying
stewed
pineapples
whenever she reads about
a
child's
suffering. Alyosha
admits to
sharing
her dream of
being
pursued by
devils for
cursing
God?a dream similar
to Ivan's
conferences with the
Devil,
Dmitry's
dream that "someone is chas
ing
me,"
and
Fyodor's
drunken
experience
of
feeling
"over
whelmed
by
irrational terror and moral shock"
(684,553,106).
But
much of Lise's
psychology
remains
mysterious, particularly
her
confinement to a
wheelchair,
which is similar to her mother's
outbreak of
leg pains during
Rakitin's
advances,
and her alterna
tion between childishness and
coquetry.
Mothers are
largely
written out of the novel. The
monastery
excludes
them?indeed,
the Elder's audiences with
women are a
prime object
of
Fy
odor's
mocking
and
Ferapont's
criticism.
Kolya's doting
mother cannot control him.
Ilyusha's
mother is
disturbed
or
retarded;
according
to
Katerina,
insane: when her son
is
ill,
she takes the
gift
of a
toy
cannon from him.
The clearest
signal
from
Dostoevsky
that the novel does
not
pertain
to female
development
is the cold water
dumped
on
Snegir
yov
and
Alyosha by
Varvara,
Ilyusha's daughter,
who,
for this one
episode
of the
novel,
had left
"Petersburg
and
look[ing]
for the
rights
of the Russian women" to tend her
suffering family (238).
When
Alyosha
visits their
cottage,
Varvara is infuriated
by
her
father's sanctimonies to him about divine
providence:
"Oh,
do
stop playing
the fool!" cried the
girl
at the window
unexpectedly, turning
to her father with an air of
disgust
and
disdain. "Some idiot comes
along
and
you
have to
put
us all to
shame!"
(234)
Varvara is the novel's least
developed
character,
and
given
her
combination of hard-headedness and
commitment,
one of the
most
potentially complex.
She is also the
only
character who is not
moved
by Alyosha's
innocent saintliness:
indeed,
she
ignores
him
except
to refer to him as an
"idiot"?as if to
signal
that the
problems
of the male characters do not define all of human
nature,
certainly
not the nature of women
like herself.
What the Karamazov sons
do define
are some
possible Oedipal
resolutions when one's father is
"[an]
old clown"
(40).
In his note to the
reader,
Dostoevsky
refers to his novel as "a
chapter
out of
my
hero's
[Alyosha's]
adolescence"?as
a
study
of a
45
The Massachusetts Review
son as he
passes
into adulthood
(xxvi). Alyosha's
basic
develop
mental
problem,
and that of his
brothers,
is to
get beyond
their
father's devaluation of their mothers and his abandonment of
them after the mothers' deaths.
Dostoevsky's
narrator
describes
Fyodor
in the first
chapter
as
"worthless and
depraved
. . .
muddle-headed,"
"an ill-natured
clown,"
and "a most
licentious man
all his life"
(3, 4).
He is
depicted
as
embezzling
from mothers and
sons,
philandering
in
their
presence,
even
forgetting
that Ivan and
Alyosha
had the same
mother.
Let us treat
Fyodor's
"Karamazov
sensuality" (90)
not as a
distorted
representation by Dostoevsky
of the
severity
which Freud
attributes to
Dostoevsky's
own
father but as a
character
study
of a
different
variety
of defective father,
analysis
rather than
a
symptom
of
a
neurosis.
Unlike Laius and old Hamlet
(and
unlike
Dostoevsky's
father,
as Freud understood
him), Fyodor
Karamazov
provides
no
model
which
a son
might
use to
temper
his desire and
identify
himself as a
fulfillment and extension of his
parents. Fyodor's vulgarity
as
abuser of the
boys'
mothers lies
beyond any villainy
which Shake
speare
conceived in Claudius
as
Gertrude's
usurper.
While the
youths Oedipus
and Hamlet kill their
paternal
rivals,
the
only
Karamazov son who
fights openly
with his
father,
Dmitry,
is
humiliated
by
him,
over
money
and a woman.
Fyodor
is an
extension,
or a
mutation,
of
previous literary Oedipal
villains.
In a
Freudian transformational
analysis,
the unconscious
thought generating
an
array
of
symptoms
is
represented
as a root
sentence. For the
Karamazovs,
that sentence should
express
the
sons'
common
grievance against
their father. The sons' Karama
zov
predicament
resembles that which Freud attributed
to the
epileptoid Dostoevsky.
But Freud's root sentence for
Dostoevsky,
"You wanted to kill
your
father in order to be
your
father
yourself,"
is
already
several
steps beyond
the sons' initial
position.
It
begs
the
question
of the novel's
plot development,
the
exposition
of the
different motivations for the
parricide
among
the sons. Freud's
more
general
formulation of the
"repressed thought"
of
paranoia
in the Schreber case
might
serve as a
template
for the
underlying
clausal
representation
of the sons'
predicament.
Freud
argued
that
the clause
underlying
the varieties of
(male) paranoia
is,
"I
(a man)
[do not]
love him." A
representation
of the
grievance
of the
sons
Karamazov
might
be,
"I
[a son]
cannot love
my
father."
46
The Sons Karamazov
To
explicate Dostoevsky's
"transformations" of this
predica
ment does not
call for
"deep" interpretation
of the novel
by
Freud's
most familiar method:
treating
the text like
a
dream and
undoing
distortions
imposed
on
unconscious
thoughts by primary pro
cesses. Freud
uses
this
"deep"
method
to
elucide the
meaning
of
literature such
as the Prometheus
myth
and Hoffmann's "The
Sand-Man."7 For an
analysis
of
literary "ego styles,"
the
appro
priate
method is that which Freud
applied
to Norbert
Hanold,
the
hero of
Gradiva,
and to the historical Leonardo:
a
simple gather
ing
and
sorting
of
ordinary
behavior.8
Indeed,
only
one
device from
Freud's method of
"deep" interpretation
is needed for the
sons,
a
device which Freud discussed most
intensely,
and one
central
to the
spiritual problem
of The Brothers Karamazov: the
symbolic equiv
alence of "God" and "father."9
If
Dostoevsky
can be credited with a thesis in his elaboration of
the sons'
character,
it would be identical to one of Freud's in
"Dostoevsky
and Parricide": that an effort to
cope
with
a
grievance
against
a defective father exacts an
accommodation in the charac
ter-formation of
a son. The
sons
Karamazov do not
simply
trans
form "I
(a son)
cannot love
my
father" into "I
(a son)
hate
my
father."
They
do not
simply
hate their father. In
Dostoevsky's
depiction,
a son cannot
simply
hate his father. Most
appropriately,
Dostoevsky puts
a
tendentious version of this observation in the
mouth of the Grand
Inquisitor,
who
represents
the father in Ivan's
story
but
speaks
in Ivan's own
voice of a
'rebel'
son.
The
Inquisitor
tells
Jesus?the
Son addressed
as if he were the Father?that the
sons' rebellion does not
bring justice,
and that the sons themselves
cannot tolerate their
own
rebellion
against
the Father:
They
will
pay dearly
for it.
They
will tear down the
temples
and
drench the earth with blood. But
they
will realize at
last,
the foolish
children,
that
although they
are
rebels,
they
are
impotent
rebels
who are unable to
keep up
with their rebellion.
Dissolving
into
foolish
tears,
they
will admit at last that he who created them rebels
must
undoubtedly
have meant to
laugh
at them.
They
will
say
so in
despair,
and their utterance will be a
blasphemy
which will make
them still more
unhappy,
for man's nature cannot endure blas
phemy
and in the end will
always avenge
it
on
itself.
(300-301)
The sons' effort to
cope
with their
grievance might
be
represented
with
a
second
negative
in the
underlying
sentence: "It is not the
case that I
(a son)
cannot love
my
father."
47
The Massachusetts Review
The sons' varied
approaches
to
coping
with their
grievance
involve the same
exaggeration
of
activity
and
passivity
that Freud
described in his transformational
analyses
of the
beating
and
para
noid
phantasies, Dostoevsky's
seizures and the advent of exhibi
tionism and
voyeurism.
Two sons
display exaggerated activity:
Dmitry quarrels hysterically
with his
father,
and
Alyosha attempts
to
express
"active love" as his Elder
charges
him. The other two
sons
tend toward
passivity:
Ivan condescends to the other charac
ters,
and
Smerdyakov plays
the
part
of a
cowardly, simple-minded,
eunuch-like
epileptic.
Both
types
of roles
require
character
distortion. The two
passive
sons
diminish
themselves,
Ivan
by
a
cynic's
refusal to
act,
Smerdyakov by
the
appearance
of innocence.
The two active
sons
distort the character of their father
by magnifi
cation,
Dmitry
in his extreme
vulnerability
to his father's
provoca
tion,
and
Alyosha
in
raising
for himself a
second,
saintly
father,
the
Elder,
in the
image
of his mother.
Dmitry
The eldest son
Dmitry
is the
only
one whom
Dostoevsky
created
in the
image
of the father. At the time of the
novel,
Dmitry
is
irresponsible
and
dissipated.
He seduces
young girls,
and relishes
playing
"a
filthy,
swinish trick" of condescension
on
Katerina
when she comes to his
apartment
for a loan to save her
own father
(131).
But
Dmitry,
whose mother is described
as
having
been
"short-tempered" (5),
is not a
replica
of "the old clown."
Dmitry
is
perpetually
in debt and
prone
to
quarrels
which lead to further
problems:
he did not finish his course at the
secondary
school,
entered
a
military college... fought
a
duel,
[was]
reduced to the
ranks,
again
obtained
a
promotion,
led a
riotous life and
spent, comparatively
speaking,
a
great
deal of
money. (8)10
Dmitry's
rashness thus
prevents
his
replicating
his father. He is
also
prevented by
his
sweetness,
and
by
his criticism of his father in
himself. The
examining magistrate
describes him as "'more
sinned
against
than
sinning_an
honorable
young
man at
heart,
but one
who, alas,
has been carried
away
to a
rather excessive extent
by
certain
passions'" (598).
At the time of the
novel,
Dmitry's
debts and
anger
are directed at
his father. It is his father's
likely filching
of his maternal inheri
48
The Sons Karamazov
tance that draws
Dmitry
to his father's home. His father's
apparent
success at
attracting
Grushenka,
possibly
with the
inheritance,
and
employing
her
against
him
prompts Dmitry
to make murderous
threats
against
his father in
public.
Dmitry's "honorable[ness]
at heart"
expresses
itself
as an
effort
to
extinguish
his
anger,
cease his attacks
on
his
father,
and feel
affection for him.
Dmitry's attorney
states that he
is
just
such a
two-sided
nature,
a nature that could balance himself
precariously
between two
abysses,
one that when driven
by
the most
uncontrollable
craving
for
dissipation
can
pull
itself
up
if some
thing happened
to strike it on the other side. And the other side is
love
. . .
he
may
have driven
away
the horrible
phantoms
that haunted his
childhood dreams and
longed
with all his heart to
justify
and to
embrace his father!
(864, 876-877)
Early
in the
novel,
Dmitry "secretly reproached
himself for
many
particularly sharp
outbursts in his
arguments
with his father" and
wished to
temper
them
(33).
He tells the Elder that he came to his
cell "to
forgive [his father]
and to ask
forgiveness" (81).
He tells
Alyosha
that his
attempt
to
get
his father to lend him
3,000
rubles
to
pay
back
money
entrusted to him
by
Katerina,
would be for
Fyodor
"a last chance to be
a
father"
(139).
In
"Dostoevsky
and
Parricide,"
Freud
interpreted
the author's
gambling
away
his
savings
as a
self-punishment
for
anger against
his father.
Dostoevsky
constructed
Dmitry
as
compelled
to similar
self-punishment,
in
seduction-attempts
as well as finances.
Dmitry
fails at venal
conquests
like his father's not
only
because his
rage
at
his father interferes with his actions and because his wish to love
his father
tempers
his
competitiveness,
but also
because,
having
hated his father's treatment of
him,
he criticizes his father's
impulses
in his own. Where
Fyodor
"can find in
every
woman
something?damn it!?extraordinarily interesting" (159), Dmitry
tells
Alyosha, "every
decent
man must be under the heel of some
woman"
(698). Dmitry
feels like
killing
himself with
ecstasy
at the
honorable outcome of his
impulse
to
play
the "swinish trick"
on
Katerina.
Although
he also
plans
to shoot himself for
failing
to
return
money
Katerina entrusted to
him,
and
nearly
kills
Grigory,
he restrains himself from
killing
his
father,
and is
willing
to defer
to the
marriage
suit of Grushenka's Polish officer?a widower and
seducer like his father.
49
The Massachusetts Review
The
exaggerated quality
of
Dmitry's rage
also serves as a self
punishment.
His constant murderous threats
against
his father
are
evidence of his
guilt
to members of the audience at his trial:
"Caught
him
cleverly
at
Mokroye,
didn't
they?"
"I
suppose
so.
Boasted of it
again.
He's been
telling
it all over the
town hundreds of times."
"Couldn't resist it now.
Vanity."
"A man with a
grievance,
ha,
ha!"
(854)
When he is
arrested,
Dmitry struggles
to
explain
the two
sidedness of his attitudes toward his
own
behavior and toward his
father. His effort to
forgive
his father dominates his
explanation,
for he cannot indict his father
as
the model for his
own "mean
actions." He describes
a
lifelong
conflict between
impulses
to act
like his father and an effort to be "honorable":
"You're
talking
to an honourable man?a most honourable
man,
don't lose
sight
of
that,
above all?a
man who's committed lots of
mean
actions,
but who has
always
been and still is a most honour
able human
being,
as a human
being,
inside,
at
bottom,
and
well,
in
short,
I?I'm afraid I don't know how to
put
it. I
mean,
what has
made me so
unhappy
all
my
life is that I
longed
to be an honourable
man,
to be as it were a
martyr
to honour and to seek for it with a
lantern,
with the lantern of
Diogenes,
and
yet
all
my
life I've been
playing dirty
tricks on
people
like all of
us,
gentlemen?(542)
Dmitry
cannot
say
that his father is like himself in
playing dirty
tricks;
he makes
a
universal
comparison,
"like all of
us,"
rather
than the
particular,
"like
my
father."
Dmitry's
substitution of the
universal for his father is
roughly
reminiscent of Freud's
megalo
manic fourth transformation of
paranoia,
which turned "I love
him" into "I hate
everyone."
But
Dmitry
is not satisfied with his
formulation,
and thus disavows that
dirty
tricks have been
played
by
anyone
other than himself:
"I
mean,
like
me
alone,
gentlemen,
not like
all,
but like
me alone.
I'm
sorry,
I was
wrong?like
me
alone,
me alone!
....
[original
ellipsis]
Gentlemen, my
head aches"
(542)
He has
spared
his father his criticism
by
not
stating
his
similarity
to
him. He has been unable to
state,
"I am like
my
father in
playing
dirty
tricks
on
people."
His "head
aches,"
and in his next senten
50
The Sons Karamazov
ces,
he
explains
that he cannot
judge
his father because he resem
bles
him?physically.
"You
see,
gentlemen,
I didn't like the
way
he looked. There was
something
dishonourable about
him,
boastful and
trampling
on
everything
sacred,
jeering
and lack of
faith?horrible,
horrible! But
now that he's
dead,
I think
differently."
"Differently?
How do
you
mean?"
"No,
not
differently,
but I'm
sorry
I hated him so much."
"You feel
penitent?"
"No,
not
penitent.
Don't write that down. I'm not
very good
looking myself, gentlemen,
that's the truth. I'm not
very handsome,
and that's
why
I had
no
right
to consider him loathsome.
Yes,
that's
it. You can write that down."
(543)
Dmitry's
confession is bracketed
by
two dreams of
conscience,
which
can be
interpreted through
their contexts as
expressions
of
Dmitry's
wish to free himself from his "swinishness." When his
examiners
produce
the brass
pestle
which he
impulsively
snatched
from Grushenka's
pantry
as he flew to his father's and used
on
Grigory, Dmitry
mentions
a
persistent
dream
"that someone is
chasing
me?someone I'm
terribly
afraid of?
chasing
me in the
dark,
at
night?looking
for
me,
and I hide
somewhere from behind a door
or a
cupboard?hide myself
so
humiliatingly?and
the worst of it is that he knew
perfectly
well
where I've hidden
myself
from
him,
but he seems to be
pretending
deliberately
not to know where I
am,
so as to
prolong
my agony,
to
enjoy
my
terror to the full...
[original ellipsis]
That's what
you're
doing
now! It's
just
like
that!"(553)
But after he admits
hoarding
Katerina's
money
(like
his father
hoarded his
inheritance),
he is able to dream of himself
caring
about
a
hungry "babby
. . .
chilled to the marrow." In the
dream,
Dmitry
asks
"why
the burnt-out mothers stand there?
Why
are
people poor?
Why's
the
babby poor? Why's
the
steppe
so bare?
Why
don't
they
embrace and kiss one another?
Why
don't
they sing joyous songs?
Why
are
they
so
black with black misfortune?
Why
don't
they
feed
the
babby?" (596)
Thus,
as the
magistrate,
the defense
attorney
and
Dmitry
himself
explain, Dmitry's
character-solution to the defectiveness of his
51
The Massachusetts Review
father is to
maintain both sides of a
conflict. This ambivalence
might
be
represented:
"I
[a
son not
like
my
father]
cannot love
my
father,
but I
[a
son
like
my
father]
cannot not love
my
father." The
underlying
clause would be doubled to
represent
both sides. Dmi
try's similarity
and difference in
respect
to his father would be
represented by
the
presence
and absence of "not" in the two
paren
thetical
phrases.
His effort to
cope
with a
defective father would be
represented
as the second
negative,
which
justifies
the
doubling
of
the
underlying
clause and
appears
in both clauses. In the
paren
thetical of the first
clause,
the
negative
would mark that
aspect
of
Dmitry
which is "not like" his father and
quarrels
with him. In the
second
clause,
as in
Dmitry's
remarks to his
interrogators,
that
aspect
of
Dmitry
which he
acknowledges
as
like his father "cannot
not love" him: the second
negative
would mark
Dmitry's
refusal
to
hate.
(Dmitry's
self-criticism
might
be
represented by
another
transformation: "I
(a
son
like
my father)
cannot love
my
father in
myself.")
Ivan
All three sons from
Fyodor's
two
marriages
are
ignored by
him
after their mothers' deaths. In his
testimony
at
Dmitry's
murder
trial,
the
village
doctor recalls
Dmitry:
"he was a little
chap
so
high,
abandoned
by
his father in the
backyard,
where he used to run about in the dirt without his boots
and his little breeches
hanging by
one button..."
[original ellipsis]
(793)
But
Dmitry
was treated
kindly by Grigory. Dmitry
recalls:
"That old
man?why, gentlemen,
he used to
carry
me in his
arms,
washed
me in the tub when
I,
a
three-year-old
child,
was
abandoned
by everybody.
He
was like a
father to me!"
(539)
Ivan and
Alyosha,
in
contrast,
were
taken in
by
the wife of a
general,
their mother's
"benefactress,
her
instructor,
and her tor
menter." As a
child in the "benefactress's"
home,
Sophia
had
"attempted
to
hang
herself from
a nail in
a
box-room."
(While
Dmitry's
mother was
"fearless,
impatient, dark-complexioned,
endowed with
extraordinary physical strength"
and beat her hus
band,
Sophia
was "terrorized since her childhood" and suffered
"terrible fits of
hysteria" [5,11].)
Because their foster
parentage
was
that much crueller than
Dmitry's,
Ivan and
Alyosha might
be
52
The Sons Karamazov
expected
to
require greater
exertions to
cope
with their
grievances
against
their father.
Ivan,
like
Dmitry,
feels
conflicting feelings
toward his father.
But while
Dmitry openly expresses
both his
rage
and wish to
forgive,
Ivan contains the same two attitudes in a
compromise
expression,
a
pose
of tolerance
occasionally
broken
by
an
expres
sion of
contempt.
Dmitry's rage against
his father has the "adult"
justifications
of
his
inheritance-dispute
and
competition
for Grushenka. Ivan's
rage
seems
fixed
on
grievances
of
early
childhood,
of a
helpless
child abandoned
by
his father. Ivan's indictment of
God,
the
Father,
for
allowing
the torture of children
by parents
and surro
gates, expresses
Ivan's
preoccupation
with infantile abandonment
in
minimally-camouflaged
terms. Ivan's
rage
is more intense than
Dmitry's,
and
barely manageable:
Ivan,
unlike
Dmitry, truly
"hates,"
rather than "cannot
love,"
his father. As Ivan's delirious
acceptance
of
guilt
for the
parricide
reveals,
his
pose
of tolerance is
finally inadequate
to contain his
rage.
Ivan is described
as
becoming
after his abandonment "a rather
morose
young man,"
aware that he and
Alyosha
"were
living
among strangers
and
on other
people's charity, [and]
that their
father was a man of whom one
ought
to be ashamed to talk"
(13).
But when the adult
Dmitry
asks Ivan to mediate the
"daggers
drawn"
argument
with his
father,
Ivan moves into his father's
home. "Both of them seemed to be
getting
on
marvellously
together,"
even
though
his father
recognizes
when Ivan does
not
stop
him from
talking
nonsense
"out of sheer
spite,"
that he had
"come to live with me
and...
despise
me in
my
own
house"
(158).
Ivan's hatred overflows his
pose
of tolerance before the
murder,
when he abstains from
guarding
his father
against Dmitry
and
Smerdyakov.
He tells
Alyosha,
"One
reptile
will devour another
reptile,
and
serves them both
right" (164).
The
instability
of Ivan's
pose
of tolerance
expresses
itself in his
intellectual
play
with
conflicting positions.
He
hedges
in debate
with
Alyosha by refusing
to answer whether
anyone
"has the
right
to decide who deserves to live and who
doesn't,"
but then
allowing
a
person
"the
right
to wish
[the
death of
another]" (166-167).
Both
the woefulness of his
grievance
and his inhibition
against
attack
ing
his father are
expressed
most
dramatically
in his
questioning
how God
can
be
good
and
omnipotent
when there is evil in the
world.
53
The Massachusetts Review
Before the time of the
novel,
Ivan had written
a
widely-read
essay
arguing
for
a
theocracy?universal
rule under the Father?that
"several shrewd
persons
decided
. . .
was
nothing
but an
imperti
nent
practical joke" (14). Speaking
of the
essay,
the
monastery
librarian
virtually
describes Ivan's mechanism of
concealing
hatred
by
tolerance: "There's a
great
number of new ideas in
it,
but
they
seem to cut both
ways" (66).
Rakitin states of Ivan's
writing
and
philosophy,
"Your brother Ivan is
writing theological
articles at
present
as a
joke
and for some idiotic
reason,
for he himself is an
atheist,
and this
Ivan,
this brother of
yours,
himself admits that what he's
doing
is
mean and
despicable.
. . .
"You've heard his
stupid theory,
haven't
you?
If there is
no
immor
tality
of the
soul,
there is no
virtue,
which means that
everything
is
permitted.'...
He's a
dirty
little
boaster,
but what it all comes down
to is that 'on the one
hand,
we cannot but
admit,
and
on the other
we cannot but confess.' His whole
theory
is
nothing
but a
dirty
trick!"
(90-92)
Conversing
with
Alyosha
before the murder at an
inn,
Ivan
delivers the
prologue
and tale of the Grand
Inquisitor.
He
begins,
"I wanted to discuss the
suffering
of
humanity
in
general,
but
perhaps
we'd confine ourselves to the
sufferings
of children."
(277)
Ivan tells his
brother,
"T too love little children
terribly,'"
who
"'suffer
terribly
on
earth
...
for their
fathers,'"
"'who have eaten
the
apple
and know
good
and evil and have become "'"like
Gods.'"" Ivan seems to be
condemning
his
father,
but in his next
sentence he identifies himself with his father
by adding
that men
like
himself,
"cruel
men,
passionate
and carnal
men,
Karamazovs,
are
sometimes
very
fond of children"
(278).
Ivan
spares
his father
from criticism here
by separating
the "cruel" Karamazov in whose
voice he thinks he is
speaking
from those adults who victimize
children,
and from the children themselves.
In the
body
of the
prologue,
Ivan describes children's torture
by
adults,
especially parents,
at such
length
that he remarks that he
must be
torturing
his brother. Ivan then concludes the
prologue by
stating
that he "'cannot
accept'"
and must "'renounce
[a] higher
harmony altogether'"
in
which,
at the end of
days,
a mother will
embrace her child's torturer and
join
in the declaration of the
Father's
justice (286).
If "father" is substituted for
"God,"
the
54
The Sons Karamazov
prologue
becomes
an
indictment of an
uncaring Fyodor
whose
attention
was
elsewhere
as his children suffered in the terrible
care
of their
guardians.
But Ivan withholds criticism from his father
again:
even
though
Ivan would
not have the mother
praise
God's
justice,
he
stops
short of
condemning
the
Father,
instead
rejecting
the idea of a
mother
forgiving
the torturer of her child before the
divine throne
as
the
harmony
of creation is revealed:
"
'It is not God
that I do not
accept....
I
merely
most
respectfully
return him the
ticket'"
(287).
Ivan
spares
the Father
a third time in the climax of his tale of the
Grand
Inquisitor.
Ivan had heard his father tell
Smerdyakov
that
he'd
"'go straight
to hell and be roasted there like mutton'"
(148)
for his heretical discourse
on
avoiding
torture and damnation. At
the
opening
of Ivan's
tale,
the
Inquisitor
is
burning
heretics at the
stake,
and thus the
Inquisition
can
be read as a
literary
substitute
by-association by
Ivan for
Fyodor's
treatment of his children.
Indeed,
the
Inquisitor's
two basic traits are the reversal and
intellectualization of "Karamazov
sensuality."
Rather than the
fleshy,
bloated
appearance
which
Dmitry
loathed in his father and
himself,
the
Inquisitor's
face is
"shrivelled,"
with
"bloodless,
aged
lips" (292, 309).
Where
Fyodor enjoys dissipation,
lies,
and clown
ing,
the
Inquisitor
rules
by
"miracle, mystery
and
authority" (308).
After the
Inquisitor's
discourse in which Ivan lets the father
torturer
expound
his
own
views
on
the
inappropriateness
of free
dom for the human
majority,
the Son has his
victory.
But Ivan
spares
the father
again. Although
the
setting
is the
Inquisition,
Ivan
depicts
the Son as
acting
as
tolerantly
toward the
Inquisitor
as
he acts toward his
own father. The Son defeats the murderous
father in the tale
by
a
reversal of condemnation?a kiss. The Son
then
accepts
the
Inquisitor's banishing,
and walks
away
from the
scene of tortue. '"The kiss
glows
in his
heart,
but the old man
sticks
to his ideas'"
(308),
and
presumably goes
back to
torturing
his
children in the auto-da-fe.
The substitution of "father" for "God"
explains
also the
fallacy
in Ivan's
philosophy by
which
Smerdyakov
can
suggest
Ivan's
responsibility
for his murder of their father: if there is
no
God?
that
is,
if there is no
consciousness of the father?then
everything
is
permitted, including parricide.
But if there is
no
father,
there can
be
no
parricide.
And if there has been
parricide?if
someone
has
acted
as if
everything
is
permitted?then
there had to be
a
real
father,
and
everything may
not be
permitted. (The possibility
that
55
The Massachusetts Review
there is a
good
father is
expressed by
Ivan's devil in his tale of the
atheist
philosopher
who
died,
discovered that there was a
paradise
open
to
him,
and was
damned because he declared it"
'against [his]
principles'"[756].)
Thus,
a
clausal
representation
for Ivan's character-solution to
his father would double the
root-sentence,
as in
Dmitry's
transfor
mation,
to
represent
ambivalence. But it would have to
represent
as
well the
greater
intensity
of Ivan's
grievance
as
"hate,"
and the
proximity
of the
conflicting
attitudes in his
pose
which
suggested
"an
impertinent joke"
to his readers and
an
argument
which
"
'cuts
both
ways'"
to the
monastery
librarian in
particular.
Ivan's solu
tion
might
be
represented,
"I do not
hate
my 'father,'
but I hate
my
father." The son's effort to
cope
with his
grievance
is here realized
not
only by
the
negation
of "hate" but
as
irony quotes:
as
long
as
he
can treat his father
cynically,
Ivan is
protected against
the
explo
sion of his
rage.
But Ivan's second
clause,
which
expresses
his
rage,
"I hate
my father,"
is
untransformed,
untouched
by
the effort.
Under
Smerdyakov's
influence,
the defense of
irony
fails,
and Ivan
is left with the full
weight
of the hatred
represented
in the seond
clause.
Smerdyakov
Ivan's tolerance of his father is
a
mitigated
variant of the obse
quiousness
with which
Smerdyakov
addresses
everyone
in the
Karamazov household. The
expressions
of
contempt
which
escape
occasionally
from Ivan
are
less intense than
Smerdyakov's
com
parable displays?his
childhood torture of
animals,
murder of
Fyodor, baiting
of
Ivan,
and his
suicide,
when Ivan finds the
resolve
to
bring
him to court. If the sons' initial
predicament
is
represented,
"I cannot love
my father,"
Smerdyakov's
transforma
tion involves
self-deprecation
and
generalizing
of his hatred from
his father to Ivan and
everyone
else.
Dmitry's
defense
attorney
describes the universalized hatred
underlying Smerdyakov's
dis
play
of
infirmity:
"It is true he was
weak in
health,
but in
character,
in
spirit?oh,
no,
he was not
by any
means the weak man... I
certainly
did not find a
trace of
timidity
in him... Neither was there
any
trace of
simplicity
in
him;
on
the
contrary,
I found in him a terrible mistrustfulness
concealed under a cloak of
naivety,
and
an
intelligence
that was
capable
of
comprehending
a
great many
things
...
I left him with
the conviction that he was a
spiteful
man,
excessively
ambitious,
56
The Sons Karamazov
vindictive,
and
violently
envious
...
he hated his
parentage,
was
ashamed of
it,
and
gnashed
his teeth
every
time he remembered that
he was the son of
"stinking
Lizaveta." He treated
Grigory
and his
wife,
who had looked after him in his
childhood,
with
disrespect.
He cursed and
jeered
at Russia
...
I believe he loved
no one
but
himself and that he had a
strangely high opinion
of himself
. . .
Believing
himself to be the
illegitimate
son of
Fyodor
Karamazov
(and
there are facts which confirm
it),
he
might
well have resented
his
position
as
compared
with that of the
legitimate
sons of his
master:
they
had
everything
and he had
nothing, they
had all the
rights, they
would
get
the
inheritance,
and he was
only
a cook."
(871)
Smerdyakov's
character-solution
might
be
represented,
"I am not
like
my
father
or
his sons?and I hate all of them." Even more than
Dmitry's attempt
to
pardon
his father
during
his
interrogation,
Smerdyakov's
character solution is
strikingly
similar to one
of
Freud's,
his transformation for
megalomania
in the Schreber
case:
"/ do not love at all?/ do not love
anyone."
Of the sons
Karamazov,
Smerdyakov
had been treated most
cruelly: Grigory,
who tended the
boy Dmitry
"like
a
father,"
was
grim
and harsh to
Smerdyakov,
who
appeared just
after the death
of his
own,
only
child.
Grigory
tried to
prevent
the
christening
of
his son because it had been born with six
fingers; Grigory
referred
to him as 'a
dragon,'
and he died two weeks after the
christening.
When the infant
Smerdyakov
was found new-born with his
dying
mother in the Karamazov
bathhouse,
Grigory
referred
to him as
"born of the devil's son and a
holy
innocent"
(114),
but
Grigory
and his kind wife Marfa
adopted
him.
As a
boy Smerdyakov
"was fond of
hanging
cats and
burying
them with
ceremony,"
but was
caught by Grigory,
"birched
severely,"
and told that he was "not a human
being"
but "came
from the bathhouse slime"
(144-145). Grigory slapped Smerdya
kov
harshly
for the
heresy
of
asking
where the
light
came from for
the first
days
of creation if the sun
and
moon were
created
on the
fourth. This
beating
was
the occasion of
Smerdyakov's
first
epilep
tic seizure.
Thereafter,
he became
squeamish,
and "seemed to
have
grown suddenly
old... and
began
to look like a
castrate"
(145).
But
his sadism
persisted,
and
was the cause of
Ilyusha Snegiryov's
guilty,
fatal fever: from
Smerdyakov Ilyusha
learned to feed his
dog
a
pin
hidden in a
piece
of bread.
Smerdyakov's underlying
hatred of his
father,
like
Ivan's,
reveals
57
The Massachusetts Review
itself in a
religious disquisition. Grigory
had told the Karamazovs
at dinner about
a
Russian soldier who had not renounced God
under threat of torture.
Smerdyakov argues closely
in
response
that
the soldier could have
escaped
damnation if he had renounced
God. Ivan's tale is a
rejection
of the Father's world in which
innocents are tortured
by parents. Smerdyakov explains
a
loophole
by
which a
person
can evade
persecution by
a
display
of weakness.
In
Smerdyakov's
rationalization,
a
person
denying
God
(the
Father)
to evade
martyrdom (torture
in the name of the
Father)
can
escape
damnation
(torture
after death in the name of the
Father):
"you
see,
the moment I'm accursed
by
God,
at that
very
moment,
at
that
highest
moment, sir,
I become
entirely
like a
heathen,
and
my
baptism
is taken off me and is considered null and void... if I'm no
more a
Christian,
then I can't be
telling
no
lies to
my
torturers when
they
asks me whether I am a Christian
or
not,
for God himself has
stripped
me of
my
Christianity
on account of
my
intention alone
and even before I've had time to
say
a word to
my
torturers."
(150)
But while Ivan's
arguments
are
discussed
respectfully by
the
company
in the elder's cell and
by Alyosha
at the
inn,
Smerdyakov
is taunted
during
his
disquisition
as
"Balaam's ass"
by Fyodor
and
declared anathema
by Grigory?and
before Ivan
(143-145). Fyodor
ribs Ivan to
praise Smerdyakov's argument, telling
Ivan that Smer
dyakov's story
was "all for
your
benefit"
(149).
The hatred of the
Karamazovs concealed in
Smerdyakov's
deference is evident later
in the tone of
arrogance
with which he
repeats
to a
neighbor
two
Karamazov
insults,
Fyodor's
statement that "the Russian
peasant
must be
flogged''
and Ivan's reference to him as "a
stinking lackey''
(263).
Smerdyakov's "squeamishness,"
his "eunuch-like"
manner
after his
whipping by Grigory,
served him
originally
as an
accommodation
to his
step-father's brutality.
In the
light
of
Freud's
analysis
of
Dostoevsky's
seizures,
Smerdyakov's epilepsy
should also be considered
a
self-punishment
for,
a means of
coping
with,
thoughts
of
revenge. Smerdyakov's appearance
of defective
ness would later
serve him in a
contrastive
way, by distinguishing
him from his
persecutors, expressing
the
"
'strangely high opinion
of himself
"
which
Dmitry's attorney
observed.
Smerdyakov's
pas
sivity
serves him for
an
alibi. His
feigned
seizure allows him to
escape suspicion
for the
parricide,
and his
pose
of
simple
mindedness allows him to draw Ivan to
accept responsibility
for it:
58
The Sons Karamazov
"
'everything
is
permitted'.
This
you
did teach me
sir,
for
you
talked
to me a lot about such
things:
for if there's
no
everlasting
God,
there's no such
thing
as
virtue,
and there's no need of it at all.
Yes,
sir, you
were
right
about that. That's the
way
I reasoned."
"Did
you
think of it
yourself?"
Ivan asked with a
wry
smile.
"With
your
guidance,
sir."
(743)
Alyosha
Like
Smerdyakov, Alyosha copes
with his father
by disavowing
carnality (Smerdyakov,
his
own;
Alyosha,
his
father's)
and trans
forming
it into
something
female. The effort to
cope
with
a
defective father seems to
require
each
son to distort the
image
of
himself
or
his father. In different
ways Dmitry
and
Smerdyakov
deform the
images
of
themselves;
Sophia's
two
sons,
Ivan and
Alyosha,
distort the
image
of their father. The distortions
by
the
two older
brothers,
Dmitry
and
Ivan,
are less extensive than those
of their
younger
siblings. Dmitry's falling
short of his father is
a
less severe self-reduction than
Smerdyakov's "appearance
of
a cas
trate.
''
Ivan' s
euphemistic
characterization of his
depraved
father
as
a
"'reptile'"
to whom he can
condescend is less extreme than his
brother
Alyosha's reconception
of the father
as the embodiment of
maternal love.
The transformations of the two
younger
sons
also
negate
mascu
linity,
as the mark of "Karamazov
sensuality." Smerdyakov's
fawn
ing
is the denial of his
own
masculinity, leaving
the
image
of his
father's
masculinity
un
transformed.
Alyosha
invokes his mother's
devotion to the Russian church to raise for himself
a
second father
whom he cannot
hate,
the Elder Zossima.
Alyosha's
condition is described
by
his friend Rakitin: "'A sen
sualist after
your
father and a
saintly
fool after
your
mother'"
(90).
Alyosha's
solution is
suggested by
Freud when he excluded
Alyo
sha as the "contrasted
figure" among
the brothers
guilty
of the
parricide: Alyosha
denies the
possibility
of
hating
his father in
redefining
his
saintly
mother's
capacity
for love as a
fatherly
trait,
embodied
by
the Elder.
Alyosha's
identification with the
Elder,
in
turn,
further
inspires
him to love rather than hate his Karamazov
father.
Thus,
Alyosha's
transformation
might
be
represented,
"I do not
hate
my father,
I love
my father,
because
my
Father is like
my
mother."
Alyosha's
transformation doubles the reference of "fath
er,"
like the
irony quotes
in Ivan's transformation: for
Alyosha,
the
59
The Massachusetts Review
first two mentions refer to
Fyodor
Karamazov,
the third to the
Elder?an
ambiguity
for the
purpose
of defense. The second
nega
tive is realized
as the
replacement
of 'love' for
'hate,'
and the
introduction of 'mother' in the father's
place.
In
manipulating
the
lexical
opposites,
"love" and
"hate,"
and "father" and
"mother,"
Alyosha's
transformation is the most similar of the sons'
to Freud's
definitive transformations in the Schreber
case.
Alyosha
comes to the Russian church
through
a
single
unper
ishing
memory
of his mother:
only
in his fourth
year
when his mother
died,
he remembered her all
his life?her
face,
her
caresses,
"just
as
though
she were
standing
alive before me"
...
all he remembered
was an
evening,
a
quiet
summer
evening,
an
open window,
the
slanting
rays
of the
setting
sun
(it
was the
slanting rays
that he remembered most of
all),
an
icon in the corner of the
room,
a
lighted lamp
in front of
it,
and on
her knees before the icon his
mother,
sobbing
as
though
in
hyster
ics,
snatching
him
up
in her
arms,
hugging
him to her breast
so
tightly
that it
hurt,
and
praying
for him to the
Virgin. (17)
Beyond
this narrative
link,
Dostoevsky
has motivated
Alyosha's
solution of
recreating
the father in the
image
of the mother in the
terms of the Elder's
spiritual
vocation: to
provide
adults with the
traditional maternal idea of nurturance and relief from conflict
as
their Father. Zossima teaches
"abiding,
universal
love,"
that
every
one is
really responsible
for
everyone
and
everything" (376, 339).
He tells Lise's mother that she can be assured of the
reality
of
an
afterlife
"By
the
experience
of active love. Strive to love
your
neighbors
actively
and
indefatigably.
And the nearer
you
come to
achieving
this
love,
the more
convinced
you
will become of God and the
immortality
of
your
soul. If
you
reach the
point
of
complete
self
lessness in
your
love of
your
neighbours,
you
will most
certainly
regain
your
faith and
no
doubt can
possibly
enter
your
soul."
(61)
He
discharges Alyosha
to service in the
world,
"in sorrow
seek[ing]
happiness" (86),
and
Alyosha
soon finds himself stoned and bitten
by Ilyusha
for
Dmitry's
humiliation of
Ilyusha's
father. '"You'll
have to take a
wife, too,'"
Zossima
says,
and
even before this he has
sent
Alyosha
to relieve Lise Khoklakov of her
cruelty
and self-hate.
That
Dostoevsky
thinks of such
loving
as
originally
a
maternal
function is
suggested by
the Elder's contribution
to the discussion
60
The Sons Karamazov
of Ivan's
polemic
that
society
be transformed into a
Church,
a
discussion which
prefigures
the novel's treatment of the
parricide
and the terrible fates of
Dmitry,
Ivan and
Smerdyakov.
Zossima
states that in its
judicial
function,
'"the
Church,
like
a
tender and
loving
mother,
refuses to have
anything
to do with
punishment
herself... the Church... never loses contact with the criminal as a
dear and still
precious
son'"
(72). Alyosha
tells
Lise,
'"my
elder said
that
one had to care for
people
as one
would for
children,
and for
some
people
as
though they
were
patients
in a
hospital'" (253).
Dostoevsky
has rendered the
'ego styles'
of
Alyosha's
two fathers
as
complements
of
giving
and
receiving.
Karamazov loads his
egotism
onto
others,
and Zossima relieves
people
of theirs.
Fyodor
tells
Alyosha
that the Karamazovs "do
everything contrary
to
what's
expected
of us"
(203).
Indeed,
Fyodor
tries to
degrade
others
by being
"a clown."
Dostoevsky quotes
his internal rationali
zation:
"It does indeed seem to me
every
time I
go
to see
people
that I am
more
contemptible
than
anyone
else and that
everyone
takes
me for
a clown?so that's
why
I
say
to
myself,
all
right,
let me
play
the
clown,
because
you're
all without
exception
more
stupid
and more
contemptible
than I." He wanted to
revenge
himself
on
everyone
for
his own
filthy
tricks.
(98)
Zossima's
ego style
can
be understood in the definition of the
institution of elders:
An elder is a man who takes
your
soul and
your
will into his soul
and will.
Having
chosen
your elder, you
renounce
your
will and
yield
it to him in
complete
submission and
complete
self
abnegation.
This
novitiate,
this terrible
discipline
is
accepted
voluntarily by
the man who consecrates himself to this life in the
hope
that after
a
long
novitiate he will attain to such a
degree
of
self-mastery
and
self-conquest
that at last he
will,
after a life of
obedience,
achieve
complete
freedom,
that is to
say,
freedom from
himself,
and so
escape
the fate of those who have lived their whole
lives without
finding
themselves in themselves.
(28)
Thus:
Fyodor
forces his worst
qualities
on
others to
punish
them
for his low
self-esteem,
while Zossima
accepts
the worst
qualities
of
others to free them from themselves.11 That
Alyosha recognizes
his
need to defend himself
against
tendencies like his father's is
sug
gested by
his admission to
Dmitry during
his confession of his
61
The Massachusetts Review
debaucheries that "T'm the same as
you,'"
and to Rakitin that he
'"himself" has
thought
about his father
being
murdered. The
severity
of
Alyosha's
defense
against
"Karamazov
sensuality"
can
be seen in "his absurd and morbid
modesty
and
chastity.
He could
not
bear
to
hear certain words and certain conversations about
women"
(19).
Alyosha might
be
expected
to falter in
expressing
active love if
he suffered a
particularly
intense dose of
paternal
"Karamazov
sensuality." Fyodor gives Alyosha
such a
dose in
reminiscing
about
a
simultaneous offence
against Alyosha's
mother and their
religion:
"Well,
I
thought
to
myself,
let's knock that
mysticism
out of her.
'You
see,'
I said to
her,
'you
see
your icon?there?well, look,
I'm
going
to take it down. Now watch
me.
You think it's a miracle
working
icon,
don't
you?
But I'm
going
to
spit
on
it in front of
you
and
nothing
will
happen
to me!' As soon as she heard
me,
good
Lord,
I
thought
she'd kill me on the
spot.
But she
only jumped
to
her
feet,
threw
up
her
hands,
then covered her face with
them,
began
shaking
all over and fell
on
the floor?fell all of a
heap.'" (160)
Dostoevsky's
narrator continues:
The drunken old man
had
gone
on
spluttering
and noticed
nothing
till the
very
moment when
something strange happened
to
Alyosha?exactly
the same
thing,
in
fact,
as had
happened
to the
'shrieker' when he threatened to
spit
on
her icon.
Alyosha jumped
up
from his
seat,
exactly
as his mother had
done,
threw
up
his
hands,
then buried his face in them and trembled all over in a
sudden fit of
hysteria, shaking
with silent sobs.
Alyosha
suffers this seizure when his
"ego style"
is overwhelmed
as a
mechanism for
coping
with his father.
Like?exactly
like?his
mother,
Alyosha
is driven to the brink of
mayhem: Fyodor
himself
recognized
that his wife's seizure occurred when she
might
have
killed him on the
spot.
These identical seizures of mother and
son
under
provocation strikingly
resemble
Dostoevsky's
seizures in
Freud's account as
self-punishments
for
parricidal thoughts,
and
substitutes for murder.
Conclusion:
Ilyusha Snegiryov
If feverish deliriums are taken
as
equivalents
of
seizures,
each of
62
The Sons Karamazov
the Karamazov sons can be
recognized
as
suffering
seizures like
Alyosha
and
Sophia
when their defenses
against Fyodor
are
exhausted.
Dmitry
suffers his "delirium"?it is a
chapter title?during
his
flight
to Mokroe when his wish to love his father has
gained
ascendance
over
his
grievance,
when he has
spared
his father's life
and resolved to concede Grushenka
to her suitor. From that
moment,
despite
his arrest and
conviction,
Dmitry
arises
as a "new
man,"
even one
resolved to
accept
the "cross" of his sentence to
Siberia.
Dmitry's
"seizure" is the
pain
of
a
rebirth.
Ivan has his feverish
meetings
with the Devil when his
pose
no
longer
can
contain his
rage,
after the actual
parricide
and Smer
dyakov's blaming
him for it. Ivan's consciousness is flooded
by
the
intentions he had
repressed:
in his
delirium,
he
accepts guilt
for his
hostile unconscious
thoughts
as if
they
had been actions.
Smerdyakov's
outcome is the converse of Ivan's. Because of his
history
of actual
seizures,
the
feigned
seizure enables him to
escape
immediate
suspicion
for an
actual murder. But this ruse sets in
motion the events which lead to
Smerdyakov's
absolute,
uncom
promised self-punishment,
suicide.
Smerdyakov's ability
to
feign
seizures which he
previously
could not control
implies
that he has
exhausted not
only
his character-defense of
pusillanimity
but also
the
original
conviction,
implied by
his
seizures,
that his
parricidal
impulses
warranted
prohibition.
Ilyusha Snegiryov's
fatal fever arises from
guilt,
not at
being
an
angry
son to his
father,
but
a
"cruel father" to his
dog.
Indeed,
Ilyusha's
father refers to his son as if he were his father?as "old
fellow,
dear old fellow"
(904). Ilyusha
is the
only
son in the novel
who
displays uncomplicated
love for a
defective father: he serves as
his father's
champion.
The character-solutions of the Karamazov
sons to their
griev
ance with their father
vary
according
to the
severity
of their child
hoods.
Likewise,
Ilyusha's
solution reflects the
relatively
small
dose of
paternal
defectiveness with which he has had to
cope.
His
father,
Snegiryov,
is not "selfish and
depraved"
like
Fyodor,
but
incompetent
and humiliated. Katerina relates that "he seems to
have committed some
offence in the
army
and been
discharged,"
and
was
"completely
destitute" when
Dmitry dragged
him out
into the street
by
his
"bath-sponge"
beard for
carrying
out
Fyodor's
commission and
"everyone laughed
at him"
(225). Alyosha
sees in
his face
63
The Massachusetts Review
a sort of extreme
arrogance and,
which was so
strange,
at the same
time unconcealed cowardice
...
There was a sort of weak-minded
humour in his words and the inflexion of his rather shrill
voice,
spiteful
and timid in
turn,
but unable to
keep
it
up
for
any
length
of
time and
faltering continuously. (231)
But
Ilyusha,
unlike the Karamazov
sons,
does not feel his father's
defects
to be directed
against
him.
Thus,
Ilyusha
could
run
behind
Dmitry
as
Dmitry dragged
his father into the
street,
"crying
and
begging
for his
father,
appealing
to
everyone
in the street to defend
him"
(225).
Afterward,
Ilyusha
still dreams of
rescuing
his father?
as far
as
Ilyusha's
sense of
reality
will allow.
Snegiryov
recalls to
Alyosha:
"Daddy,"
he said. "I'll
get rich,
I'll become an officer and I'll
conquer everybody,
and the Czar will reward
me,
and I'll come back
here and no one will then dare to?" Then after
a
pause
he
said,
his
lips
still
trembling
as before:
"Daddy,"
he
said,
"what
a
horcid town
this
is,
Daddy!" (241)
Although Ilyusha
attacked him
savagely, Alyosha recognizes Ilyu
sha to have
adopted
a
high-minded
character-solution to his
father: "So
your
little
boy
is a
good boy.
He loves his father and
attacked
me
because I'm the brother of the man who insulted
you"
(233).
If each son's effort to
cope
with a defective father
can be
represented,
"It is not the case
that I cannot love
my father,"
then
Ilyusha
has found a
way
for the
negatives
to cancel each other: his
transformation
is,
"I can
love
my
[suffering]
father."
Ilyusha
is the
only
son in the novel whose defective father does
not die. This
son
dies
instead,
from the effects of
poverty,
his
guilt
for his
cruelty
toward his
dog,
and
perhaps
from the
psychic
burden of his
inability
to restore his father. '"When I
die, get
a
good
boy?another
one,'"
he tells his
father,
'"choose
one
yourself
from
all of
them,
a
good
one,
call him
Ilyusha
and love him instead of
me.
. .
.'"
(657; original ellipsis).
The novel ends with
Alyosha's enjoining
the
schoolboys
after
Ilyusha's
funeral
that,
in
opposition
to their "fear of
becoming
bad" when
they
are
older,
"there's
nothing higher,
stronger,
more wholesome and
more use
ful in life than some
good
memory,
especially
when it
goes
back to
the
days
of
your childhood,
to the
days
of
your
life at home. You are
told a lot about
your education,
but some
beautiful,
sacred
memory
64
The Sons Karamazov
preserved
since
childhood,
is
perhaps
the best education of all. If a
man carries
many
such memories into life with
him,
he is saved for
the rest of his
days." (910-911)
Alyosha
asks the
boys
to remember each
other, and,
finally,
Ilyusha,
"who has united us in this
good
and kind
feeling
which we shall
remember and intend
to remember all our lives? Let us remember
his face and his clothes and his
poor
little
boots,
and his
coffin,
and
his
unhappy
and sinful
father,
and how
bravely
he stood
up
for him
alone
against
his whole class!"
(912)
Unlike the four
Karamazovs,
Ilyusha required
no
ambivalence
or
distortion to
accommodate himself to his father.
Perhaps
as Dos
toevsky's exceptional
transformation,
Ilyusha's example
to the
other sons
may
be read as a referent for the
passage
from St.
John
which
Dostoevsky
chose for the novel's
epigraph: "Verily, verily,
I
say
unto
you, except
a corn of wheat fall into the
ground
and
die,
it
abideth alone: but if it
die,
it
bringeth
forth much fruit."
NOTES
^'Dostoevsky
and
Parricide,"
translated
by
V.
Woolf,
in The Standard
Edition
of
the
Complete Psychological
Works
ofSigmund
Freud
(hereaf
ter,
Standard
Edition), gen.
ed.
James Strachey,
23 vols. London:
Hogarth
Press,
and Institute of
Psychoanalysis, 1953-1974).
21: 186.
Joseph
Frank,
in
Dostoevsky:
The Seeds
of
Revolt,
1821-1949
(Prince
ton: Princeton
University
Press,
1976), p. 89,
challenges
Freud's
"probable
assumption...
that the attacks... did not assume an
epileptic
form until
after the
shattering experience
of his
eighteenth year?the
murder of his
father"
(21:181).
For this
assumption
to be refuted would not invalidate
Freud's
interpretation
of the
seizures,
but it does
suggest
a more
widely
symptomological
and less
narrowly biographical reading
of Freud's
interpretation,
one
which would
place greater weight
on
the
interpreta
tion of
Dostoevsky's
works. The Brothers Karamazov has been read in the
light
of Freud's
essay,
although
not in the terms of Freud's transforma
tional framework. See Mark
Kanzer,
"Dostoevsky's
Matricidal
Impulses,"
in
Joseph
Coltrera, ed., Lives,
Events and Other
Players (Downstate
Psychoanalytic
Institute
Twenty-Fifth Anniversary
Series,
4).
New York
and London:
Jason
Aronson, 1981, pp.
295-309. See also
J.
R.
Maze,
"Dostoevsky: Epilepsy, Mysticism
and
Homosexuality,"
American
Imago
38
(1981):
155-183;
and
Geoffrey
Carter,
"Freud and The Brothers
Karamazov/'
Literature and
Psychology
31
(1981):
15-31. Elizabeth Dal
ton,
Unconscious Structures in The Idiot: A
Study of
Literature and
Psychoanalysis (Princeton:
Princeton
University
Press,
1979)
has inter
preted expressions
of
parricide
and its
self-punishment
in that novel.
65
The Massachusetts Review
For a
psychoanalytic study
of
psychopathology
based
on
developmen
tal conflicts between "Son and
Father,"
including
accounts of
experiences
strikingly
similar to those
depicted
of the
Karamazovs,
see
the
essay by
Peter
Bios, Journal of
the A merican
Psychoanalytic
Association 32
(1984):
301-324.
2Freud's
fullest,
most
explicit
use of the transformation
was his first:
the derivation of four
types
of
paranoid symptoms
in his
(1911)
commen
tary
on Schreber's
autobiography ("Psycho-Analytic
Notes
on an Auto
biographical
Account of a Case of Paranoia
[Dementia Paranoides]),
trans. Alix
Strachey
and
James Strachey.
Standard Edition 12: 63-65.
In "Instincts and their Vicissitudes"
(1915;
trans. C. M. Baines. Stan
dard Edition 14:
129-130),
Freud uses
the
grammatical passive
voice
to
represent
instinctual
passivity,
a
defense which Freud calls
"turning
about the self."
In "A Child is
Being
Beaten"
(1917;
trans. Alix
Strachey
and
James
Strachey.
Standard Edition 17:
185-189),
Freud
employs
the transforma
tional
technique
to
gloss
the
development
of a common
variety
of
phan
tasies in which "the child
being
beaten" is never the
person having
the
phantasy
but a brother
or
sister,
or some other child.
3In
"Negation,"
trans.
Joan
Riviere,
Standard Edition 19: 236.
^'Indications and Contraindication for the
Application
of the Stand
ard
Technique," Journal of
the American
Psychoanalytic
Association 4:
2(1956), p.
170.
translated
by James Strachey.
Standard Edition 4: 264.
translated
by
David
Magarshack.
Two vols
(i-382, 383-913). (Balti
more:
Penguin, 1958),
2: 390.
7"The
Acquisition
and Control of
Fire,"
trans.
Joan
Riviere. Standard
Edition 22: 185-193. "The
'Uncanny',"
trans. Alix
Strachey.
Standard
Edition 17: 219-256.
%Delusions and Dreams in
Jensen's
Gradiva,
trans.
James Strachey.
Standard Edition 9: 1-95. Leonardo da Vinci and a
Memory of
his
Childhood,
trans. Alan
Tyson.
Standard Edition 11: 57-137.
Especially
in Totem and
Taboo,
trans.
James Strachey.
Standard
Edition 13: vii-161.
10The formation of a child's
personality
in reaction to the
personality
of
a
troubled
parent
is
a
central
topic
in
psychoanalysis.
Therese Benedek
describes
a child's accommodation
to an
inadequate parent,
in "Parent
hood as a
Developmental
Phase,"
Journal of
the American
Psychoana
lytic
Association 7
(1959):
The child in
adapting
to the
parent's
conflictual behavior either does not
learn new controls
or
may
give up
those which were
already
established. In
order to avoid emotional isolation from the
parent,
the child
introjects
the
conflict of the
parent
which threatens his
security.
In his
"regressive
adaptation"
to the
parent's
conflictual
behavior,
the child
incorporates
a
"fixation,"
thus
making
certain that he will not become a better
person
than his
parent
is.
(pp. 403-404)
1
fyodor's
behavior,
and its
complement
in the Elder's
spiritual
func
tion,
strikingly suggest projective
identification
(and
its
introjection),
a
66
The Sons Karamazov
primitive
defense mechanism
postulated by
Melanie Klein in
1946,
in
"Notes on Some Schizoid
Mechanisms,"
in
Envy
and Gratitude and
Other
Works,
1946-1963 The
Writings
of Melanie Klein
3,
Roger Money
Kyrle (gen. ed.).
International
Psycho-Analytical Library 104) (London:
Hogarth
Press and the Institute of
Psycho-Analysis, 1975), pp.
1-24. In
Klein's
account,
an infant "understands"
hunger
and other
pains
as
attacks
by
a "bad
mother,"
and retaliates
by imaginatively projecting
its
"bad"
parts
into the mother it has "identified" as the source of those
parts.
The infant then feels the
depression
of
having
harmed the
mother,
and
escapes by developing
an
integrated
sense of
"objects."
Karamazov would
be
employing
a form of
projective
identification
or
perhaps
a related
mechanism such
as "the evocation of a
proxy,"
and
Zossima,
performing
the "maternal" function of
containing
and
metabolizing
the bad
psychic
parts. Projective
identification remains controversial in
psychoanalytic
literature,
but the elder's
calling
is also similar to the more
accepted
description by Margaret
Mahler of the maternal
"symbiotic ego"
function
of
relieving
the infant from tension. For a discussion of these
issues,
see
my
"Validation of
Psychoanalysis,
and
'Projective
Identification,'"
Semiotica,
forthcoming.
Richard
J.
Rosenthal has
interpreted
"Raskolnikov's Destructiveness"
as
projective
identification,
in Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?: A Memor
ial to
Wilfred
R.
Bion,
ed.
James
S. Grotstein
(Beverly
Hills:
Caesura,
1981),
199-235.
67