The Brothers Karamazov is considered by many as the greatest novel ever written with notable admirers including Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Franz Kafka amongst others.
The novel represents the pinnacle of Dostoevsky's work, encapsulating the theological and existential themes that dominated his writing especially for the last 16 years of his life. His exploration of morality, faith, and the human condition in earlier works like "Crime and Punishment" (1866), "The Gambler" (1867), "The Idiot" (1868), and "The Possessed" (1872) is fully realized in "The Brothers Karamazov." Serialized from 1879 to 1880 and completed a year before his death at 59, this final novel held such significance for Dostoevsky that he once said “I’d die happy if I could finish this final novel, for I would have expressed myself completely.”
Like any good novel, Brothers Karamazov has many layers and can be endlessly interpreted. Superficially, it is a murder mystery involving the murder of a degenerate man, Fyodor Pavlovich, with all but one of his four sons implicated in one way or the other.
However, running underneath the main narrative lies a profound investigation of humanity's belief in God, examining the essence of this belief and the interplay between intellect and faith within that belief.
The novel is also rich in religious symbolism with Dostoevsky frequently referencing the Bible, Christian history and Russian Orthodox tradition. In many ways reading Brother’s Karamazov felt a little bit like reading Rumi’s Masnavi which similarly makes liberal use of the Koran, the Prophet’s teaching and Islamic history. Indeed the objectives of both the writer-philosophers, in their attempt to crystallize the teachings of their respective religions, are very similar. Surprisingly, their messages are remarkably similar as well despite stemming from different literary and religious backgrounds, employing different literary techniques, and being separated by vast periods of time and cultural differences.
To explore his existential questions, Dostoevsky creates three different archetypal men in the three Karamazov brothers,each driven by the three forces driving all men: emotion, reason and faith. Dmitri, the oldest, is a debauched gambler driven by his passions; Ivan, the middle child, is a philosophical writer driven by his intellect; while Alyosha, the youngest, is a monk who sees the world through the lens of his Christian faith.
Dostoevsky sets these brothers in the midst of 19th century Russia, experiencing social and spiritual turmoil, and surrounded by the murder of their father’s murder. Through the moral crises that arise from this complex backdrop and the response of each brother as a result of his value structure of either emotion, reason and faith, Dostoevsky creates fertile ground for his philosophical probings.
While Alyosha, the naive young brother who believes in loving all regardless of their actions and their beliefs, is pitched as the hero and Dmitri dominates the action through his debauch adventures, it is undoubtedly Ivan’s intellectualstruggle in trying to justify the existence of a merciful, loving God amidst the suffering of the world that grabs most readers’ attention and provides the real philosophical meat of the novel.
Indeed, two of the most memorable chapters in the novel “The Grand Inquisitor” and “The Devil” center around Ivan’s intellectual struggle with his beliefs. In the first, Ivan lays out his existential doubts about faith in a parable and in the second, the Devil appears in front of a delirious Ivan and tortures and teases him about those doubts.
Ivan relates to most readers because it is the Ivans of this world, men and women of intellect, that end up reading a 900-page deeply symbolic novel about faith and free will written almost 150 years ago by an old Russian man. The Dmitris and the Alyoshas of this world, men and women of passion and faith likely don’t have either the time or the conviction to take such an undertaking.
Indeed, the list of thinkers, writers and philosophers who admired this novel, shared at the beginning of this article, all possessing towering intellect, should be enough to confirm this fact.
Ivan’s Rebellion
So what exactly are Ivan’s struggles that make him so relatable to the novel’s readers?
At the beginning of the novel, it seems that Ivan is an atheist when he is introduced as a profound, radical thinker who has recently written an essay on ecclesiastical courts which divided opinion: “The main thing was the tone of the article and its remarkably unexpected conclusion. And yet many churchmen decidedly counted the author as one of their own. Suddenly, however, along with them, not only secularists but even atheists themselves began to applaud from their side. Finally some quick-witted people concluded that the whole article was just a brazen farce and mockery.”
Very soon, it however appears that he is a nihilist who claims that if there is no God, then everything is permitted. He claims that “there exists no law of nature that man should love mankind..[and that] the moral law of nature ought to change immediately into the exact opposite of the former religious law, and that egoism, even to the point of evildoing, should not only be permitted to man but should be acknowledged as the necessary, the most reasonable, and all but the noblest result of his situation.”
A bit later, however, when questioned by his brother Alyosha about this he claims to have been joking when he says "I said that on purpose yesterday, at dinner with the old man, just to tease you, and I saw how your eyes glowed.”
Later on he professes his belief in God to Alyosha but shares furthermore that “It’s not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God’s, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept.”
Ivan finally crystallizes his rebellion against God in his parable of the “Grand Inquisitor“. In the parable, Ivan resurrects a Spanish cardinal of the Catholic Church during the time of the Spanish Inquisition who castigates Christ for his rejection of Satan’s temptations that promised to ease human suffering by means of miracles that would have fed the hungry, resolved moral dilemmas and given a clear purpose to man’s life. The cardinal argues that by rejecting these offers and in choosing to grant man freedom so he could choose freely between Good and Evil, Christ only increased their existential suffering. He finally adds that “turmoil, confusion, and unhappiness—these are the present lot of mankind, after you suffered so much for their freedom!”
The chapter is a remarkable, brilliant, and astonishing challenge to God from his own creation: a complaint from Ivan against the suffering and the plight that mankind finds itself in. Readers of the Eastern Literary tradition will find many similarities between Ivan’s complaint with Iqbal’s famous poem The Complaint which, amongst other poems of his, similarly challenges God to answer for the suffering, torment and grief that he sees around him.
The roughly twenty-page chapter, many times published separately, stands as one of Dostoevsky's most renowned works, often drawing more admiration than the novel itself. To communicate the nuanced nature of Ivan’s rebellion, Dostoevsky intensifies the Christian symbolism, incorporating at least thirty-seven allusions to the Bible, as well as Christian history and literature (as per the Everyman’s Library edition), a number exceeding that of any other chapter in the book. As a result, while the chapter is thought-provoking for an average reader, it offers deeper and more profound interpretations open only to those well-versed in the literature and the history being referenced.
Ivan’s descent into Madness
So what is Ivan then? Is he a believer who believes in God and his morality; an atheist who does not believe in God but believes in some form of morality; or a nihilist who neither believes in God nor any form of morality?
It is precisely in trying to answer these existential questions using his intellect that Ivan loses his mind. Over the course of the novel, we see him fluctuating between belief and nihilism and, lacking a coherent value structure, struggling to make decisions about almost everything. He loves Katya, who is betrothed to his brother Dmitri, but fails to take any initiative, vacillating between his self-interest that commands him to possess her and the moral goodness that calls on him to step aside. Similarly, he wants to develop a close relationship with his younger brother Alyosha but is unable to bring himself to show his brother any love in the face of his nihilistic jokes.
But most importantly, harboring a latent loathing for his depraved father, he realizes that there is nothing stopping him from taking his life. However, he again vacillates. And in the end, when he realizes that it is his psychopathic, dim-witted half-brother Smerdyakov who, influenced and inspired by Ivan’s nihilistic facade, has taken the dreadful action instead, his ideological foundations crumble. The rug is pulled from under his feet! He finally realizes not only the actions he would have to undertake if he was being true to his nihilistic philosophy but also how he lacks the courage to undertake them. Horrified at the prospect of turning into a murderer if he aligns his actions with his philosophy, and disgusted at the idea of being seen as a coward if he aligned his philosophy with his actions, Ivan is paralyzed by indecision and descends into madness.
In the chapter titled “The Devil”, the devil, himself proud of his intellect, appears before Ivan to confess how his own intelligence tortures him by suspending him between belief and disbelief. He shares with Ivan that his “dream is to become incarnate, but so that it's final, irrevocable, in some fat, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound merchant's wife, and to believe everything she believes. My ideal is to go into a church and light a candle with a pure heart-by God, it's true. That would put an end to my sufferings.
As if once was not enough, the devil repeats himself: “I will repeat to you once more that I would give all of that life beyond the stars, all ranks and honors, only to be incarnated in the soul of a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound merchant's wife and light candles to God."
And then makes a mockery of Ivan’s struggle to justify his actions in the absence of God. He says “There is no law for God! Where God stands—there is the place of God! Where I stand, there at once will be the foremost place …. "everything is permitted," and that's that!' It's all very nice; only if one wants to swindle, why, I wonder, should one also need the sanction of truth? But such is the modern little Russian man: without such a sanction, he doesn't even dare to swindle, so much does he love the truth ..."
This insult proves to be the final straw. Ivan has no answer to this challenge to his convictions and can do nothing but fling a glass of tea at his hallucination at which the Devil remarks "Ah, but how stupid, really! He considers me a dream and he throws glasses at a dream!”
Unlike the devil in Goethe’s Faust who, despite his intentions, proves to be a means to Faust’s redemption, the devil in Brother’s Karamazov offer’s Ivan no way forward but appears only to mock him and push him headlong into his madness.
Dostoevsky’s message
If there is a message from Dostoevsky in Ivan’s fate it is that reason, rationality, intelligence and intellect are insufficient in trying to make sense of an irrational existence. That human beings need a coherent set of values and beliefs to navigate through life's uncertainties and that such values always require an irrational blind faith. Ivan’s dilemma then is reminiscent of the Kierkegaard’s claim that “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom". Like Kant, Dostoevsky wants us to realize that one needs “to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith”
Ivan’s confusion at picking a direction reminds me of Nietzsche’s first aphorism on the death of God and its implications for man. In Aphorism 125 of the book "The Gay Science", published two years after the Brothers Karamazov, Nietzsche challenges humanity to confront the implications of living in a world where traditional moral absolutes are no longer valid. In it, Nietzsche describes the Madman who proclaims God’s death and asks “Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards,in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness?”
Ivan is essentially the tragic Nietzschean hero who, having realized the death of God, lacks the courage to create his own values and as a result is unable to pull himself out of his existential malaise.
Concluding Remarks
Readers relate to Ivan because, in his journey, they see a reflection of their own struggles with belief. Seeing Ivan’s torment they are forced to ask the same questions of ourselves: are they believers, atheists or nihilists? Or are they neither of these and thus doomed to Ivan’s state of indecision, uncertainty, and eventual madness?
Dostoevsky's exploration of Ivan’s character compels readers to confront the uncomfortable possibility that perhaps the “free world”, at least an agreeable one, is not infact where “everything is permitted.” That without a value system that demands restraint and a sense of right and wrong, we might find ourselves adrift in a moral vacuum not knowing whether to go “Backwards, sideways or forwards.”
While Dostoevsky explores the devastating and self-destructive power of the intellect through Ivan he also provides the seeds of its redemption through the teachings of Father Zosima who, similar to Rumi, espouses endless love as the ultimate answer to problem’s of belied. However an exploration of this likely requires separate post which I will try to write later.
Whether Dostoevsky is right about the fate of Ivan or not: whether those trying to ground their view of the world using intellect are indeed condemned to madness, it is interesting to see how this interplay and tension between Reason, Intellect and Rationality on one side and Faith, Belief and Intuition is present in the works of almost all philosophers, poets, and writers. Revisiting recently works from Plato, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Emerson, Goethe, Aurelius, Lao Tzu, Kant, Kierkegaard, Iqbal, Rumi, Tolstoy, Gogol, Cervantes, I can sense the same tension. And more often than not it seems that they end up to a similar conclusion as Dostoevsky albeit sometimes through a different route and stated in different terms
Further Explorations
I hope you guys found this useful. If you have read the Brother’s Karamazov I would love to hear what you guys thought about it.
As usual, I would like to end this edition with some resources you might find helpful in exploring the various themes of the novel further
Text & Translations: You can read Constance Garnett’s translation of The Brothers Karamazov as well as the chapters on The Grand Inquisitor and Ivan’s Devil for free online through these links. However, most critics will recommend reading the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, which you can access through Kindle.
Biography, Review and Critiques: Joseph Frank, the foremost Dostoevsky critic, published Dostoevsky’s biography Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time and Lectures on Dostoevsky which are extremely interesting and insightful to read as you make your way through Dostoevsky’s Oeuvre. It is also worth checking out Nabokov’s criticism of Dostoevsky, whom he did not rate very highly, in his Lectures on Russian Literature.
Youtube Reviews/Analysis: I find YouTube reviews an entertaining way to keep me engaged as I work through some of the bigger novels like the Brothers Karamazov. For a literary review, Benjamin McEvoy does a great job and if you’re interested in amore philosophical review then Michael Sugrue’s review should help you there.
Live Action Enactments: If reading is not up your cup of tea then fortunately there is an old movie (in Russian) available online on YouTube in three parts (here, here and here).