Table Of Content

A New Word on The Brothers Karamazov Northwestern University Press Studies in Russian Literature and Theory Founding Editor Gary Saul Morson General Editor Caryl Emerson Consulting Editors Carol Avins Robert Belknap Robert Louis Jackson Elliott Mossman Alfred Rieber William Mills Todd III Alexander Zholkovsky A New Word on The Brothers Karamazov Edited by Robert Louis Jackson With an introductory essay by Robin Feuer Miller and a concluding one by William Mills Todd III NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS / EVANSTON, ILLINOIS Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois 60208-4210 Copyright © 2004 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2004. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 0-8101-1949-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data are available from the Library of Congress. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the Ameri can National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Truth dawns in adversity. —Fyodor M. Dostoevsky Contents Preface ix List of Abbreviations xi The Brothers Karamazov Today 3 Robin Feuer Miller Refiguring the Russian Type: Dostoevsky and the Limits of Realism 17 Robert Bird Mothers and Sons in The Brothers Karamazov: Our Ladies of Skotoprigonevsk 31 Liza Knapp Shame’s Rhetoric, or Ivan’s Devil, Karamazov Soul 53 Deborah A. Martinsen Two Fates: Zosima’s Bow and What Rakitin Said 68 Tatyana Buzina Struggle for Theosis: Smerdyakov as Would-Be Saint 74 Lee D. Johnson Accidental Families and Surrogate Fathers: Richard, Grigory, and Smerdyakov 90 Vladimir Golstein The God of Onions: The Brothers Karamazov and the Mythic Prosaic 107 Gary Saul Morson Did Dostoevsky or Tolstoy Believe in Miracles? 125 Donna Orwin The Sexuality of the Male Virgin: Arkady in A Raw Youth and Alyosha Karamazov 142 Susanne Fusso Zosima’s “Mysterious Visitor”: Again Bakhtin on Dostoevsky, and Dostoevsky on Heaven and Hell 155 Caryl Emerson Dostoevsky—Genius of Evocation: The Scene of Fyodor Karamazov s Murder and Its Symbolic Topography 180 Horst-Jürgen Gerigk The Legend of the Ladonka and the Trial of the Novel 192 Kate Holland Sensual Mind: The Pain and Pleasure of Thinking 200 Marina Kostalevsky The Jewish Question and The Brothers Karamazov 210 Maxim D. Shrayer Alyosha’s Speech at the Stone: ‘The Whole Picture” 234 Robert Louis Jackson The Brothers Karamazov Tomorrow 254 William Mills Todd HI Preface It has been said that the great Gothic cathedral, an example of which is to be found in the thirteenth-century Cathedral of Our Lady at Chartres, can never be seen or fully taken in from any single perspective or in any given light; it is manifold and changing from every point of view. The same may be said of The Brothers Karamazov, a work that breathes not the spirit of sublime belief but a God-tormented one, a spirit groping for faith. The Brothers Karamazov stands like Chartres Cathedral. It is a work to be read, experienced, seen from many angles. Critical and scholarly lit erature cannot substitute for the reading of the novel. It can only suggest points of view: ways of looking, paths to an understanding of the workings of the novel as an artistic text, of its moral, psychological, and philosophical complexities and crises, of its constant search for foundations. What marks the writings in this volume is the comprehensive nature of their grasp of Dostoevsky: on the one hand, an understanding of his artistic thought, his psychological insights, and the artistic means and materials he brings to bear on his work; on the other, a recognition of the value-oriented nature of everything that comprises his artistic effort. “I want to speak out as passionately as possible,” Dostoevsky wrote in connection with his novel The Demons. “I want to speak out to the last word . . . even if my artistry perishes in so doing . . . but I will speak my mind.” The paradox here is that his passionate ethical and social intensity—the kind that in a lesser writer often renders the artistic endeavor lifeless— always resulted in a furious energizing of artistic thought and a revolution ary impetus toward new forms of artistic expression. A unity of aesthetic and ethical purpose was typical of almost ail of major Russian literature of the nineteenth century. “Depend upon it, the first universal characteristic of all great art is Tenderness as the second is Truth,” wrote the English critic John Ruskin. As though reformulating his thought, one of Dostoevsky’s characters in The Idiot remarks reproachfully to another: “You have no tenderness: only truth; hence you are unjust” (U IX