Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov

ACADEMIC PAPER

In the following paper, I argue that, rather than polyphonic in the Bakhtinian sense, Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov is instead homophonic in its overall moral orientation, albeit undeniably multi-voiced in its stylistic approach.

Introduction

As the topic of this paper, I have chosen the overall moral orientation of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I will be reading Dostoevsky, in large part, in tandem with Mikhail Bakhtin’s Problems with Dostoevsky’s Poetics, taking the latter’s conception of the Dostoevskian novel as polyphonic and open-ended as the starting point for my discussion. My main aim will be to argue that, though Bakhtin’s principle of polyphony may rightly be harnessed in order to account aesthetically and even structurally for The Brothers Karamazov, an all-encompassing application of it to all aspects of the novel, even to its overarching moral telos, may mistakenly encourage a relativistic interpretation of the work, one in which each idea tackled by Dostoevsky is set forth on an equal plane of ethical legitimacy. Plainly stated, my central thesis is: though stylistically and structurally polyphonic, The Brothers Karamazov is morally and ‘teleologically’ homophonic. I will argue this specifically in relation to the thematic role played in the work by, on the one hand, moral nihilism and, on the other, its Dostoevskian antidote, Christian faith. Central to my argument will be the contention that, though Dostoevsky may treat nihilism as a fully-fledged and independent idea in the Bakhtinian sense, one worthy of the intellectual and artistic effort it requires to explore it, it does not remain untainted by the author’s moral judgment. In other words, it remains polyphonic only intratextually but not supertextually, only structurally and stylistically but not ‘teleologically’ (What I mean precisely by these terms will be explained in due course). To this effect, The Brothers Karamazov is far from a morally ‘open-ended’ work, but rather one in which the various Bakhtin consciousnesses – or polyphonic voices – that inhabit it do indeed converge to form a kind of super-conscious consensus, a kind of moral homophony. And its homophonic moral message is simple and clear: nihilism is a pernicious threat and its remedy is a faith in the Christian God. In support of my thesis, I will examine, firstly, pertinent biographical evidence elucidating the peculiar nature of Dostoevsky’s Christian faith and, secondly, The Brothers Karamazov itself, tracing the development of its main nihilistic characters, Ivan and Smerdyakov, and contrasting them to Father Zosima and Alyosha, the novel’s most prominent Christians. Furthermore, I will contrast the Dostoevskian answer to the question of nihilism to Nietzsche’s, which in many ways is diametrically opposed to it.

Bakhtinian polyphony and unfinalisablity

I begin my paper by defining the two Bakhtinian principles most relevant to my thesis: polyphony and open-endedness, otherwise known as ‘unfinalisability’. In the first, we see that Bakhtin considers Dostoevsky’s novels as comprised, not of one overarching consciousness that represents the author’s intent, an approach we might see in Tolstoy’s work, but many consciousnesses, or voices, each highly independent and fully fledged, which converge and interact in subtle and complex ways through the novel, and form a sort of ‘super-consciousness’[1]. For its polyphonic quality, Dostoevsky’s novel can be seen as dialogical rather than monological. According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky was, in fact, the first dialogical novelist in history. In relation to the second concept, open-endedness, it is important to note that Bakhtin’s conception of Dostoevsky’s work is one of becoming rather than of stasis or terminus. And this concept is closely related to the first, to polyphony. Since Dostoevsky’s work is polyphonic, since, in other words, the various idea-units and consciousnesses that comprise it are in constant dialogical interaction with each other, they are said by Bakhtin to co-exist in a literary cosmos in which no one idea ever really wins out over the other[2]. Bakhtin, admittedly, does press upon the reader that he is not proposing a Dostoevsky that is intellectually and artistically muddled, but his final verdict seems clear: Dostoevsky’s novels are like open-ended dialogues[3], works in which the “ultimate word of the world…has not yet been spoken”[4]. In other words, his novels – The Brothers Karamazov included – are ‘unfinalised’.

According to Bakhtin, the secret to Dostoevsky’s polyphony is his ability, unprecedented in any author, to ‘rise above’ the confines of his own literary selfhood and create characters that are, to all practical purposes, completely free from authorial tyranny[5]. Characters in the Dostoevskian novel are, in Bakhtin’s conception, not mere extensions of the author’s own creative ego, mere pawns in his homogenous artistic design, but self-standing entities, so alive in their individual ideological positionings as to create the impression that, though necessarily born of the authorial creative spark, they detach themselves from it as soon as they are generated and take on a life of their own, one unmarred by “the usual externalising and finalising authorial definitions”.[6] It is this peculiar “freedom and independence characters possess, in the very structure of the novel, vis-à-vis the author”[7] – and, naturally, from each other – that allows Dostoevsky to architect his multi-voiced dialogism. If each of his characters is an embodiment of a distinct idea, or at least a system of ideas, and each idea is fully independent from the next, though interactively responsive to it, then it is easy to see how Bakhtin’s polyphonic and dialogical structure can be conceived as being built. A character/idea, who, because it is independent, constitutes its own ‘voice’, meets another character/idea (another voice), and the two voices enter into a dialogical dance that has shed the fetters of its author’s quirks and biases. For Bakhtin, the Dostoevskian novel is, in this sense, “above personal style and above personal tone”[8], unlike the monolithic works of Flaubert, which necessarily reflect the imprint of his artistic personality[9]. The ideological self-sufficiency of Dostoevsky’s characters is also, I presume, how Bakhtin accounts for the unfinalisability of his novels. Since his characters are fully independent, not only from each other but also from the author’s own personal prejudices, they must exist on an equal plane, for to state that, amid this absolute polyphonic independence, there should be a hierarchical order would be akin to arguing that there is homogeneity, the absence of which is precisely what Bakhtin states is the defining feature of Dostoevsky’s style. And since, for Bahktin, the self-sufficiency of Dostoevsky’s characters can allow no hierarchical order, it can allow no over-arching monolithic orientation either. The result is a polyphonic dialogue between independent voices which never reaches finality.

Here, it is important to underscore that when Bakhtin calls Dostoevsky’s novels ‘unfinalised’ he does not mean they are also stylistically muddled – and here we enter subtle philosophical territory. Like Anatoly Lunacharsky and Viktor Shklovsky, Bakhtin believes that, because he was a child of his age, an age of moral ambiguity and emergent nihilism, Dostoevsky was a fundamentally splintered personality. Lunacharsky declares that Dostoevksy was, morally speaking “not a master in his own home”[10], and Shklovksy similary states that Dostoevsky died “having resolved nothing” of the ethical quandaries of his era[11]. But unlike Lucharnsky, Bakhtin does not believe Dostoevsky’s ideological undecidedness was a weakness. Au contraire, he sees it as the very reason for his greatest and most original contribution to the novelistic form: polyphony. Dostoevsky may have in life been a splintered consciousness, but he capitalised on his ‘splinteredness’, channelling it into his work, thereby creating masterpieces that perfectly capture the moral uncertainty of his age. Dostoevsky’s novels are multi-voiced, but not incoherent. There is unity in the Dostoevskian novel: the unity of polyphony. The whole comes in the form of a complex coexistence of a multitude of voices, of independent consciousnesses amounting to a ‘super-consciousness’ that is still a plurality rather than a singularity, but is nonetheless unified it pluralism. Their unity is a “higher unity, a unity, so to speak, of the second order, the unity of a polyphonic novel.”[12]

Dostoevsky’s faith and morality

Now that I’ve sufficiently covered the Bakhtinian theories relevant to my thesis, I will now proceed to present it. It can be succinctly stated as follows: Dostoevsky’s work is unlikely to be either ‘unfinalised’ or ‘polyphonic’ in the supertextual, telelogical sense, though it may well be in the intratextual, stylistic sense. In the first part of my argument, I will briefly examine the peculiar nature of Dostoevsky’s Christian faith and his philosophical stance on moral nihilism, and then illustrate how they are embodied in The Brothers Karamazov. The main purpose, here, will be to illustrate that Dostoevsky, though undeniably open to the various philosophical and moral ideologies of his time, did not himself appear to be ‘unfinalised’ in relation to them. Secondly, I shall proceed to argue, on the basis of all points hitherto made, that it is difficult to conceive how an author who was far from morally unfinalised would create works that are teleologically polyphonic in the strict Bakhtinian sense, especially when it appears that the works themselves bear the mark of his own finalised moral orientation. Dostoevsky and his work were both homophonic in their overarching vision, not polyphonic.

Dostoevsky’s faith in the Christian God and ethos was far from straightforward or conventional, it is true. He was aware of and engaged with many of the most unsettling moral questions of his time, even those that threatened to destroy the foundations of religious belief itself. But to argue that, because his faith wasn’t ideologically watertight, it was also necessarily unfinalised, would be, I believe, to misunderstand the nature of Dostoevsky’s ethical position. In 1848, when, for his involvement in a radical political group, Dostoevsky was sentenced to hard labour in a Siberian concentration camp, he began to read the New Testament. He found solace from the bleakness of his situation in its teachings, and many years later, when he was finally allowed to return to Saint Petersburg, he was no longer able to authentically participate in the radical political circles he was once actively involved in[13]; he had become a profoundly religious man. He newfound religious fervour, however, had not completely annulled his intellectual curiosity, and many of the secular philosophical currents prevalent in his day continued to exercise a pull on him. Dostoevsky was still, in a very profound sense, a man of his time. In a letter he sent to one Madame N. D. Fonvizina in 1854, this is precisely how he describes himself: “I can tell you about myself that I am a child of this century, a child of doubt and disbelief, I have always been and ever will be…until they close the lid of my coffin.[14] Dostoevsky was, in other words, not immune to religious skepticism – this is clear. But he remained, in spite of it, a steadfast and devout believer. His method of arriving at faith was a curious one; he believed not by spontaneous feeling but by wilful choice. “If someone succeeded in proving to me that Christ was outside the truth,” he writes in the same letter, “I would sooner remain with Christ than with the truth.”[15] In other words, faith for Dostoevsky was more a pragmatic than an epistemological tool. It was the answer, not to the question, “What is true?”, but rather “What is good and right?” It was the solution to the great thirst that had plagued his age since God’s decline as the ultimate moral authority. In essence, what Dostoevsky is arguing is this: it matters not so much whether God exists, let alone whether Christ is his son, but whether a faith in these can save us from the spiritual doom of abandoning it. 

For Dostoevsky, the possibilities for human morality were conceived as highly dichotomised between, on the one hand, traditional theism, and on the other, nihilistic absolutism, with very few permissible gradations in-between. Without God, Dostoevsky’s fear was that all would be permitted. Man would turn morality against himself, and become, in the words of Freud, “homo homini lupus” – the wolf of his own kind[16]. Nothing but depredation and carnage would result. Here, Ivan’s proclamation, “Viper will eat viper” comes to mind[17]. The nihilists in The Brothers Karamazov are painted as either highly unsympathetic or tragic – or both. Utter devastation results from a complete working-out of their godless designs. Ivan Karamazov, the intellectual, sits for much of the novel in academic aloofness as his brother, Dmitri and his father, Fyodor tear each other apart, all the while poisoning the mind of his half-brother Smerdyakov with his nihilistic preachments. After Fyodor’s murder, Ivan goes mad with guilt, is overwhelmed by satanic hallucinations, and has to be forcibly removed from a his brother’s trial. Smerdyakov, a loathsome lackey of a character who in many ways is Ivan’s shadow-twin, is able to put into practise amoral ideas that Ivan dares only posture about. Animated by his half-brother’s notion that without God all is permitted, he kills his father for a sum of money, then, realising the emptiness of his own existence, commits suicide. An examination of the fate of these two tragic figures reveals a tentative yet clear moral telos: nihilism is a pernicious threat, and, if allowed to gain traction, it could destroy civilised society.

In Dostoevsky’s ethical conception, one could be only, on the one hand, moral in the traditional Christian sense, or, on the other, atheistic and therefore necessarily nihilistic. Atheism and nihilism were, for him, virtually synonymous, and the possibility of a humane, ethical atheism, or a sound morality outside the Christian faith was slim if not non-existent. Once God was rejected, and man was given free rein to behave as he pleased, he would likely crown himself supreme deity in God’s stead. This man-god, whom the devil himself chillingly announces to Ivan[18], vividly recalls Nietzsche’s Übermensch. In fact, much has been made, by Merezhkovsky and Stellino among others[19], of the idea that Dostoevsky anticipated Nietzsche in this and other ways. According to Gillespie, Dostoevsky’s most prominent nihilistic characters inspired Nietzsche, who took them as would-be Übermenschen, quasi-heroic figures who, though they ultimately fail because “defeated by guilt, by pity, and by despair”, nonetheless set out with the right idea[20]. Both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche were tormented by the same moral question: “In a world where God is dead, what values do we live by?” But, though they identify the same problem, they devise morally dichotomous solutions to it. Where Nietzsche conjures up the Übermensch, the “lightning” and the “frenzy”[21], Dostoevsky urges a return to Christ. For Nietzsche, the answer is the man-god; for Dostoevsky, the God-man. This, I believe, is reflected teleologically in the Brothers Karamazov’s moral orientation. Where the nihilistic characters, the would-be man-gods meet with death and depredation, the Christian characters, the followers of the God-man, live out dignified lives. Throughout the work, Alyosha remains a beacon of Christian pity and humane morality. His mentor, Father Zosima, who is similarly a representative of Christian love, weighs in directly, in his homilies, on the moral questions just covered. He warns of the dangers of secular freedom, of a complete rejection of the spiritual life in favour of science, and of a base pursuit of earthly needs:

“But what comes of this right to increase one’s needs? For the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; for the poor, envy and murder, for they have been given rights, but have not yet been shown any way of satisfying their needs.”[22]

Zosima, here, is surely speaking of the pernicious man-god, of that arrogant self-made human divinity who, having relinquished his conscience in order to be able to satisfy his whims without remorse, has turned against his fellow man and therefore himself. The idea of serving humanity is fading, Zosima bemoans, in a world in which the abandonment of Christian virtue has ushered in a pandemonic “all-is-permitted” paradigm. And what is the solution to this viper-eat-viper chaos? Predictably, it is the solution that Dostoevsky himself would propose: universal Christian love. “Love all of God’s creation,” Zosima urges. “Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love animals, love plants, love each thing. If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an entire, universal love.”[23] If there can be said to exist, anywhere in The Brothers Karamazov, a homophonic leading voice that rises above Bakhtin’s polyphonic cacophony, it is surely Father Zosima’s exhortation to universal Christian love. It is critical, here, to specify that, by Christian love, I do not necessarily mean an orthodox conception thereof. It does not appear that Dostoevsky’s relationship with Christianity was straightforward, nor does it seem his views on religious orthodoxy were blindly accepting. It could well be found, upon a more thorough inspection that lies beyond the scope of this paper, that Dostoevsky’s own proposed form of Christian love was somewhat more radical, somewhat more ‘Franciscan’ than that likely to be spouted from the pulpits of the age. That being admitted, it still would not detract from my point: however unorthodox Dostoevsky’s faith may have been, it is still Christian, and it is, I believe, what he offers a homophonic solution to the moral dilemma of his time. He does this, in The Brothers Karamazov, with Zosima as its chief mouthpiece.

I am close, here, to concluding my argument à propos Dostoevsky’s own personal moral ideology. I submit that Dostoevsky, though undoubtedly intellectually curious, was far from a split consciousness in the way Lacharnsky, Shklovsky and even Bakhtin have argued. His consciousness may indeed have been inhabited by many different though strands, and each of these may indeed be said to have fought for supremacy in it, especially at certain tragic junctures of his life, but I would argue that, above the multi-voicedness there often (if not always) rose in Dostoevsky’s consciousness a homophonic lead, one whose exultation would have likely have been accompanied by the somewhat qualifiedly triumphant utterance: “My intellect may be torn, but my heart, so far as I can command it, is not.” For clear proof, we need look no further than his letter to Madame Fonvizina, which we have already examined. Dostoevsky’s mind was fecund, and so a certain amount of multi-voicedness is to be expected in a man whose curiosity led him to explore in detail the various ideological answers to his time’s most pressing moral dilemmas. However, to suggest that this multi-voiced quality never rose above a hyperconscious cacophony, never resolved itself by placing one of its voices on a higher plane than the rest – in other words, never resolved itself to homophony – is tantamount, I feel, to attributing to Dostoevsky an ideological discomposure evidenced neither by his biography nor by the supertextual orientation of his work. In this sense, I believe Vinokur is right when he argues that Dostoevsky himself considered the modern condition of split consciousness a malady[24], and so he would unlikely have allowed himself to live enslaved to it.

Dostoevsky as supertextually homophonic

Having come thus far, I will now attempt to conclude, on the basis of everything hitherto discussed, that Dostoevsky’s solution to the moral problems of his time would likely have been, not a descent into nihilism, into a chaotic world in which “all is permitted” and the likes of Smerdyakov are enabled in their nefarious designs, but rather a return to Christian faith, or at the very least to some of its most nurturing ethical principles. Dostoevsky seems to have, in this sense, been an ethical homophonist – both in life and in his work. This does not mean Bakhtin was completely wrong. On the contrary, his notion of polyphonic dialogism perfectly encapsulates the architecture of The Brothers Karamazov. It is, in fact, the work’s over-arching structuring principle. What is, I would argue, more on the homophonic side is Dostoevsky’s moral telos, that is, his overarching, ‘super-conscious’ vision, which, though its parts may be disparate and independent, is essentially homophonic in its overall orientation. In this sense, the term ‘homophony’ is apt. For, in music, a homophonic texture is, not one in which there is only one voice (this would be ‘monophony’), but rather one in which the various voices that compromise it are ordered hierarchically, so that there is, on the one hand, one primary voice – that which carries the melody – and, on the other, several others whose function it is to accompany and support it. I feel this describes the overall moral telos of The Brothers Karamazov perfectly. While several ideas are presented in it, and while it may appear ‘during the event’ that these voices are placed on equal footing – and perhaps at this stage of the game they are – post factum, once the book is shut, so to speak, it becomes apparent that there is a hierarchy, that there is a primary voice, a melody that is given dialogical pride of place, and other supporting voices that have arranged themselves around it.

 I have been using the following terms to designate an important distinction: ‘intratextual’ and ‘supertextual’. The first refers to the architecture of The Brothers Karamazov, to Dostoevsky’s stylistic inclination and his structuring methodology, how he puts together the work. In other words, what is ‘intratextual’ lies within and amid the work proper. The second element, then, alludes to the overall picture we get of the work once it’s completed, we stand back and observe its parts, and we understand that it is more than a sum of them, that it forms a coherence, an architectural structure that we might miss were we to concentrate on each of its components without relating them together in the intended way. The intratextual element is Dostoevsky’s process; this is undeniably polyphonic. The supertextual element refers to Dostoevsky’s final product. And in The Brothers Karamazov, it is, I would argue, homophonic. The Brothers Karamazov is procedurally polyphonic, but teleologically homophonic – multi-voiced in style and structuring, but hierarchically-voiced in its overall orientation. In this sense, I don’t believe I can fully agree with Bakhtin when he argues that, in the Dostoevskian novel, the voices of each character sit alongside that of the author on equal footing. Though Dostoevsky may embody distinct ideas completely, fully flesh them out perhaps in a manner unparalleled by any other author, he does not necessarily intend for them to be taken as equally morally legitimate. This would be akin to arguing that, for Dostoevsky, the nihilism of Ivan and Smerdyakov, which reveals itself to be utterly devastating, is equal in moral legitimacy to Zosima’s Christian love, which brings about no such devastation. It would, I believe, be a disservice to Dostoevsky to portray him in such a light, since it would suggest he had more-than-something of the Underground in him. And we have seen, thanks to Vinokur, that Dostoevsky would likely have considered this hyperconscious splitness a malady rather than an advantage. Though I am willing to concede that Dostoevsky may have been hyperconscious to an extent, that he may have, in other words, toyed very seriously with different responses to his age’s most pressing ethical quandary, to suggest that he lived out his days a moral ‘polyphonist’, incapable of identifying at least the most practicable pathway toward moral salvation would be to ignore many of the most obvious facts of his biography and to depict him as lost in the refuse of his own consciousness. And if we concede this would not likely have been the case, it is hard to see how a man who has a well-formulated vision of his own moral reality could use his work to communicate any other message than one corresponding to that very reality, so that, if Dostoevsky’s convictions were, broadly speaking, anti-nihilistic and pro-Christian, it would be hard to concede how he could be disposed to create a moral telos, in The Brothers Karamazov, that would reflect any other value system than one reflecting these, even – and perhaps, especially – one in which any given idea is to be considered on equal footing with all others, including that of the author. Even if this had been psychologically possible for Dostoevsky (and I would argue it wasn’t), I would still maintain that it is an approach he would likely not have consciously chosen, for it would have been extremely difficult for him to implement it while still maintaining full artistic and intellectual integrity. Finally, I will say it isn’t lost on me that Bakhtin himself made a point of urging his reader not to mistake his notion of Dostoevskian unfinalisability as an accusation of intellectual wishy-washiness: “…this does not mean, of course, that Dostoevsky’s world is ruled by some logical vicious circle, by the inability to think a thought through, by an ill-tempered subjective contradictoriness.”[25] And yet I feel that, here, Bakhtin is at least partly contradicting himself. For how can a dialogue be both open-ended and well thought-through? To my mind, either it is thought-through to a natural conclusion, to a natural resting point or it is open-ended. And if it is open-ended, it is, I would argue, at least to a certain extent, lost in psychological splitness, in hyperconsciousness. To Bakthtin’s idea that Dostoevsky’s work amounts not to one consciousness but to several, I would add this amendment: yes, Dostoevsky’s idea-world is in an important sense polyphonic; it is comprised of a multitude of ideas, many of which are mutually-contradicting, and these ideas enter into dialogue with each other like so many consciousnesses. But, when massed together, these ideas do indeed form a single, coherent super-consciousness, one in which those contradictions are resolved and something resembling a ‘solution’ is offered. To this extent, I would argue that Dostoevsky’s work presents no compelling evidence that it is open-ended or unfinalised, at least not in the overarching moral statements it makes. Its method is therefore dialogical and dialectal (I do not see these as mutually excluding each other in the way allegedly Bakhtin does)[26]. A single consciousness can entertain a multitude of different ideas, flesh each out as completely as if it were several consciousnesses, present these ideas in dialogical form, while at the same time – and in no way that detracts from this dialogical aspect – colour the structure of this polyphonic interaction with a dialectical undulation, so that each of the voices in it adds cumulatively to the rational progression of the net total. If dialectic and dialogue were mutually exclusive, it is hardly conceivable how Plato could have written his Republic, the dialectical dialogue par excellence, or how a single person could entertain two mutually contradicting ideas at the same time and reach a rational compromise between them – which happens all the time. This, I would argue, is Dostoevsky’s method precisely: stylistic polyphony and dialogue applied dialectally in order to achieve a homophonic telos.

[1] P. 22

[2] Ibid., p. 30

[3] Ibid.

[4] Caryl Emerson. Preface: Problems with Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Bakhtin)

[5]P. 24

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] P. 25

[9] Ibid.

[10] Lunacharsky, p. 428. Mentioned in Bakhtin, p. 30

[11] Shklovsky, p. 49. Mentioned in Bakhtin, p. 30

[12] P. 25

[13] Miller, xxii

[14] Selected Letters, p. 68

[15] Ibid.

[16] Location 838

[17] Brothers Karamazov, Part I, Book 3, Ch. 9: The Sensualists

[18] Part IV, Book X, Ch. 9: “Man will be exalted with the spirit of divine, titanic pride, and the man-god will appear.”

[19] See Stellinio, p. 146: “Indeed, according to Merezhkovsky…, Ivan had ‘himself understood and foretold [the formula] ‘vsë pozvoleno’ – Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘alles ist erlaubt’ [everything is permitted].’”

[20] Gillespie, location 2432

[21] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 14

[22] Book VI. Ch. 3: Zosima’s homilies

[23] Ibid.

[24] P. 38 & 9

[25] P. 30

[26] See Caryl Emerson’s preface: “For it must be remembered that for Bakhtin ‘dialogic’ does not mean ‘dialectic’”

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