Dmitri Karamazov inherits his father’s passion for wine, women, and song, but the son’s pursuit of this tame and conventional item is tempered by frequent lapses, by periods of misgiving. The second son is a materialist and a cynic. He changes his mind after a severe illness, and his materialistic beliefs are all but supplanted by intense spiritual curiosity. The third and youngest son is an idealist, lovable and loving. Here again we have Dostoevsky’s discordant elements conveyed in terms of human characterizations. The plot of the story is as formless as life itself, for it is with life, not with plots, that Dostoevsky deals.
Dmitri’s hatred of his father is intensified by the rivalry that exists between the two in their common pursuit of Grushenka’s affections. Grushenka is a woman of the demi-monde. The author, I think, tried to draw her in lines that would reveal a physical zest of life, as evidenced, for example, in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. His failure to make Grushenka a convincing individual, as an individual, is typical, for the reasons I have already advanced.
Development of the story shows how Dmitri’s repeatedly avowed determination to kill his father bears fruit. The elder Karamazov is found dead one night, with his skull crushed. Dmitri is imprisoned. And the rest of the book, which is devoted to Dmitri’s trial, the moral regeneration of Ivan, and the urge of life in Alyosha, approaches psychological heights (or depths) that have not been surpassed to this day. Small wonder that Nietzsche referred so affectionately to the “giant spirit.”
I have made reference to Dostoevsky’s “optimism.” A better word for it is faith—faith of a new high order. He is the most cheerful, sunlight-giving writer in Russian literature. “The essence of religious feeling,” says Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, “does not come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or misdemeanors.”
Prince Myshkin is the central figure of the novel; he is the “idiot,” and everybody abuses him. He is insulted and beaten, and robbed and deceived and loved. He is the most singular figure in literature—he is Dostoevsky himself.
But he is not an idiot in any sense. He is so profoundly simple and wise, and has such great faith in human beings, that he is mistaken by the men and women of ordinary passions as a fool. While he can be readily toyed with by women—a significant phase of the writer’s own attitude toward the sex—Prince Myshkin is regarded by them from a common basis of understanding. For them he holds no quality of sex. “Perhaps you don’t know that, owing to my illness,” he says (he too is an epileptic), “I know nothing of women.”
It is in The Idiot that Dostoevsky’s women are at least life-like. The Epanchin sisters, especially the youngest, Aglaia, are not “types” in the usual sense, but preconceived studies. The pages devoted to Aglaia’s love affair with Prince Myshkin are of the happiest in the book.
Besides the books I have already mentioned, the more important works are The Possessed, in which national politics play a large part; Poor Folk, the story of a poor clerk’s love for a poor woman who eventually turns from him; and Letters from a Dead House. This last is a book of personal experiences, and reveals Dostoevsky’s relations with the criminals with whom he was imprisoned in Siberia. The mental temper of men who disregard and break the common and social laws, is set forth with the passionate curiosity that lies behind all his probings of the human soul. I am strongly tempted to offer quotations; to show, in this passage or that, how deeply Dostoevsky looked into the most extreme boundaries of human sensibilities; but on the whole extracts from his writings would do more harm than good. His work is so disconnected, though not in any sense detached, that extracts could not serve here to indicate the amazing clarity of his vision.
His books arouse a feeling of wonder that there can be so many things in our own individual emotions with which we never before came into contact. He moves us so profoundly because he tears his men and women out of their morally-bound lives and makes them confront stupendous questions—the questions of life. He plies detail upon detail of human misery until one feels that the whole world is reeling from him—then grows aware of the sweet white glow of Dostoevsky’s faith, and feels that life can hold no terrors—that he is above the petty miseries of human strife! That is why I say Dostoevsky’s optimism is of the new high order.
Dostoevsky purges one’s mind. He makes you conscious of the beauty of a soul.