Alyosha is Dostoievsky's attempt to create a superman. He is the most real, the most vital, the most human, and, at the same time, the most lovable of all his characters. He is the essence of Myshkin and Stavrogin and Karamazov and Father Zosima, the residue that is left in the crucible when their struggles were reduced, their virtues and their vices distilled. He is Myshkin whose mind has not been destroyed by epilepsy, he is Stavrogin who has seen light before his soul was sold to the devil, he is Ivan Karamazov redeemed by prayer and good works, he is the apotheosis of Father Zosima. “He felt clearly and as it were tangibly that something firm and unshakable as the vault of heaven had entered into his soul. It was as though some idea had seized the sovereignty of his mind—and it was for all his life and for ever and for ever.” In other words, Alyosha realises in a mild form and continuously that which Myshkin realises as the result of disease and spasmodically. Alyosha goes into a state of faith, of resignation, of adjustment with the Infinite, and Myshkin goes into dementia via ecstasy.
As a peace-maker, adjuster, comforter, and inspiration he has few superiors in profane literature. His speech at the Stone of Ilusha embodies the whole doctrine of brotherly love.
Dimitri's hatred of his father becomes intense when they are rivals for Grushenka's favours, so that it costs him no pang to become potentially a parricide on convincing himself that the father has been a successful rival. Psychologically he represents the type of unstable, weak-willed, uninhibited being who cannot learn self-control. Such individuals may pass unmarked so long as they live in orderly surroundings, but as soon as they wander from the straight path they get into trouble. Their irritability, manifested for the smallest cause, may give rise to attacks of boundless fury which are further increased by alcohol, and the gravest crimes are often committed in these conditions. The normal inhibitions are entirely absent; there is no reflection, no weighing of the costs. The thought which develops in the brain is at once translated into action. Their actions are irrational, arbitrary, dependent upon the moment, governed by accidental factors.
Despite overwhelming proof, Dimitri denies his guilt from the start. It is an open question if the motive of this denial is repentance, shame, love for Grushenka, or fear. The three experts of the trial each has his own opinion. The first two declare Dimitri to be abnormal. The third regards him as normal. The author himself has made it easy to judge of Dimitri's state of mind. Though on the boundary line of accountability, he is not in such a pathological condition as to exclude his free determination; however, he is not fully responsible for the crime, and extenuating circumstances have to be conceded by the judge.
Smerdyakov, the illegitimate child of the idiot girl whom Karamazov pere raped on a wager and who eventually murders his father (vicariously, as it were, his morality having been destroyed by Ivan), is carefully delineated by Dostoievsky. He is epileptic. Not only are the disease and its manifestations described, but there is a masterly presentation of the personality alteration which so often accompanies its progress. In childhood he is cruel, later solitary, suspicious, and misanthropical. He has no sense of gratitude and he looks at the world mistrustfully. When Fyodor Pavlovitch hears he has epilepsy he takes interest in him, sees to it that he has treatment, and sends him to Moscow to be trained as cook. During the three years of absence his appearance changes remarkably. Here it may be remarked that though Dostoievsky lived previous to our knowledge of the rôle that the ductless glands play in maintaining the appearance and conserving the nutritional equilibrium of the individual, he gives, in his delineation of Smerdyakov, an extraordinarily accurate description of the somatic and spiritual alteration that sometimes occurs when some of them cease functioning. It is his art also to do it in a few words, just as it is his art to forecast Smerdyakov's crime while discussing the nature and occurrence of epileptic-attack equivalents, which he called contemplations.
The way he disentangles the skeins from the confused mass of putridity, disease, and crime of which this novel is constituted, has been the marvel and inspiration of novelists the world over for the past fifty years. Dimitri wants to kill his father for many reasons, but the one that moves him to meditate it and plan it is: Grushenka, immoral and unmoral, will then be beyond the monster's reach; Grushenka whose sadism peeps out in her lust for Alyosha and who can't throw off her feeling of submission for the man who had violated her when she was seventeen. Dimitri loves Grushenka and Grushenka loves Dimitri “abnormals with abnormal love which they idealised.” During an orgy which would have pleased Nero, Dimitri lays drunken Grushenka on the bed, and kisses her on the lips.
“'Don't touch me,' she faltered in an imploring voice. 'Don't touch me till I am yours.... I have told you I am yours, but don't touch me ... spare me.... With them here, with them close you mustn't. He's here. It's nasty here.'”
He sinks on his knees by the bedside. He goes to his father's house at a propitious time and suitably armed for murder; he hails him to the window by giving the signal that he has learned from Smerdyakov would apprise him of the approach of Grushenka; but before he can strike him Smerdyakov, carrying out a plan of his own, despatches him, and Dimitri flees. The latter half of the book is taken up with the trial of Dimitri and the preliminaries to it, which give Dostoievsky an opportunity to pay his respects to Jurisprudence and to medicine and to depict a Slav hypocrite, Rahkitin. Smerdyakov commits the crime to find favour in the eyes of his god Ivan. He knows that Ivan desired it, suggested it, and went away knowing it was going to be done—at least that is the impression the epileptic mind of Smerdyakov gets—and under that impression he acts when he despatches his father with the three-pound paper weight. The unprejudiced reader will feel the sympathies that have gradually been aroused for Smerdyakov because of his disease fade as he reads of the plan that the murderer made, and when he has hung himself after confessing to Ivan. In proportion as they recede for the valet, they will be rearoused for Ivan whose brain now gives away under the hereditary and acquired burden. This gives Dostoievsky the opportunity to depict the prodromata and early manifestations of acute mania as they have never, before or since, been depicted in lay literature.
Description of the visual hallucination which Ivan has in the early stages, that a “Russian gentleman of a particular kind is present,” and the delusion that he is having an interview with him, might have been copied from the annals of an asylum, had they been recorded there by a master of the narrative art. It is one of the first, and the most successful attempts to depict dual personality, and to record the beliefs and convictions of each side of the personality. He listens to his alter ego sit in judgment upon him and his previous conduct, and is finally goaded by him to assault, as was Luther under similar though less dramatic circumstances. “Voices,” as the delirious and insane call them, have never been more accurately rendered than in the final chapters of the Ivan section of the book.
An exhaustive psychosis displaying itself in intermittent delirium, and occurring in a profoundly psychopathic individual, is the label that a physician would give Ivan's disorder. Alyosha saw in it that God, in whom Ivan disbelieved, and His truth were gaining mastery over his heart, which still refused to submit.