Mitya

On The Brothers Karamazov

It’s snowing outside my window, soft flakes the size of coins. It’s been snowing since I woke up and hasn’t stopped yet. Below my window, there’s a funny set of imprints: a thin channel in the snow, dotted with small marks. The neighbor’s cat must’ve left them, her steps sinking into the thick snow as she pushed herself through it. She often visits my window when I’m at my desk: I’ll look up and see two green eyes staring at me. Her nose is black, like her long fur, and her eyes are the only part of her face that you can distinguish, so I’m always startled at first by the otherworldly creature, all fur and shadow, featureless except for those round green eyes, which hops onto the stump by my window to haunt me. She’s not here now though—probably inside hiding from the cold—and the flakes are still falling, piling up in the little riverbed she’s carved across the snow, concealing everything.

It seems fitting that our first snow came the day I finished The Brothers Karamazov. It’s the kind of weather that makes me want Russian literature. It makes me think of Tsvetaeva’s poem “Зимой”,“In the Winter”, where she describes snowflakes covering a lover’s collar like constellations. It also makes me think of my first time through Brothers K, of sitting on a bench in a cold January and reading about Alyosha and the “threads of many worlds” he feels under the starry sky. The book is a thread itself, looped into my winter memories.

At the start of the year, I decided I wanted to reread The Brothers Karamazov, in a different way this time through. I wanted to treat it like a novel. I’m guilty of coming to classic literature as an academic; I feel like I have to catch every detail, understand every scene, puzzle out the exact intent behind every word. I have to “get it”, as if a story is an argument waiting to be decoded, and if I can walk away from a book with a sentence or two about what it “means”, then I’ve cracked it. It’s not that I think books should be read this way—I don’t—but however much I want to sit with a book without dissecting it, I also worry I’ll miss the insights I was “supposed” to have while reading it. In some ways, it’s easier to enjoy a book that hasn’t worked its way into the canon of great literary classics: you don’t feel foolish if you “don’t get it”, even if everyone else seems to; you can just let it be and let your reaction be what it is, even if it’s only “I love this, though I’m not sure why.”

But I don’t feel much pressure to have brilliant opinions, at the moment—I have neither teachers nor students listening, and so it doesn’t matter if “I say something that will amaze the whole room,” in Lizzie Bennet’s words. I’m in a season where I can read and like or dislike as it may be, no explanation needed. Therefore, when I started to reread Brothers Karamazov, I told myself I’d read it through, cover to cover, like any pulp fiction work or lighthearted beach read. And I did. I commonplaced no quotes. I didn’t try and parse out “themes” as I went. I read a few pages during snack breaks from my own writing and had to dig chip crumbs out of the gutter of the book. I read huge sections before bed, staying up late to finish chapter after chapter. I even—horror of horrors—skimmed sections if I didn’t feel like reading them at the time. I also played shameless favorites with the characters, turning pages only because I wanted to know what they would do next (despite already knowing), and feeling totally indifferent to others.

This last approach isn’t wholly new. I tend to pick out a different character to attend to every time I revisit a book. I notice myself doing it, but can’t explain why I choose the characters I do, when I do. Somtimes, I think I’m drawn to the people with whom I most identify—Eowyn in The Lord of the Rings, Nadine in Pilgrim’s Inn—but that doesn’t fit every case, like my last read of the Commedia, which I mostly spent thinking about Vergil. What’s more likely is something resembling a friend’s favorite saying about books: “they find us when we need them most”; I think for the same reason, we pay more attention to certain characters at certain times.

The first time I read The Brothers Karamazov, I mostly cared about Ivan: who he was, why he did the things he did, where his story would go. Halfway through my recent revisit, I realized I’d forgotten to notice Ivan at all, and instead, I’d spent most of the novel paying close attention to Dmitri Karamazov.

Which is funny, because my first time through the novel, I couldn’t stand Mitya. I didn’t think about him much, but when he showed up, I rolled my eyes a little. I thought he was uncomplicated, but unendearing: drinks too much, has a bizarre love life, starts brawls, treats women poorly (how often does he threaten to beat them?); a dumb jock with terrible morals. I also doubted his innocence for most of my first read. Not until Smerdyakov’s account did I absolve Mitya; throughout his interrogation, I thought he might be lying about his answers; I certainly believed him capable of killing his father. I didn’t think, based on prior experiences with Dostoevsky, that he would end up unredeemed, but I certainly thought him a likely suspect. Looking back, I’m surprised at my first judgement, when all of Mitya’s actions and answers now strike me as so clearly those of an innocent man.

What changed?

I’m sure I changed as a reader, between my first and second reads. I also fell a little in love with Mitya this time through: not in a romantic way, but in the way you do when you meet a personality for which you feel an instant, unexplained affection, regardless of age or sex or situation, a desire to know where someone’s story goes and see how their life unfolds, and a hope that it goes well, even if—as with Mitya’s—watching it sometimes makes you sigh loudly with frustration. The proper name for this feeling is friendship, of course: I said you want to see that their life goes well; Aristotle would say that you want the unqualified good for them. It’s funny to think about having friendship with book characters, personalities made up by an author, but most of us have felt it. And to do justice to the feeling: isn’t all friendship an affection for a created personality? The love for a dramatis persona in his story is an image and shadow of the love we feel for the persons in our own.

So what changed? This time, I cared about Mitya’s story, and because I cared, I began to understand him better. Previously, I agreed with him when he called himself a scoundrel, not only because of his “base” feelings, as he says, but also because I thought he was lying about his noble ones, at least at first. As I’ve said, I thought he might’ve killed his father and lied to the interrogators, and I thought he was crazy for obsessing over Grushenka and wrong in his treatment of Katya, but couldn’t understand why either woman put up with him, and didn’t think he cared much about either. Why would there be a genuine love story at the heart of Mitya’s arc? At the time, I doubted that there was one, because it made no sense to me, based on my idea of who Mitya was. Now, it seems wholly appropriate.

Early on in my reread, I realized two things: Mitya is not a murderer, nor is he a liar. When he quotes poetry, he’s sincere. When he calls himself an insect, he means it. When he says he’s fallen in love with Grushenka, he is desperately in love. When he says he wants to kill his father, he wants to, and when he says he didn’t, he didn’t. He is, as Grushenka tells his examiners, a man who can’t say anything against his conscience. His whole life seems to be an explosion of impulses both “noble” and “base”, as he says, but even at his most “scoundrel-like”, there is something childlike about the way he barrels through everything: his engagement to Katerina, his love for Grushenka, his quarrel with his father, his schemes to get money that he can’t even articulate, and every moment during his interrogation where he builds the case against himself by a poor choice of words. One has only to look at the garbled plan he proposes to Samsonov to realize that here is a man who could never spin a whole web of lies to cover up a robbery and a murder. I didn’t see that during my first read and made the same mistake as the court that sentenced him. All the facts seemed to be against him, and so I waited for the revelation that he had actually committed the murder, expecting to watch his tortured conscience play out on the page, like Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s other inverted crime novel. But the tension of The Brothers Karamazov is not a guilty murderer’s need for confession, but the sentencing of an innocent man.

Of course, there was a character who, from the beginning of Mitya’s trial, not only knew his innocence, but also named the real murderer and remained unmoving in his judgement: Alyosha Karamazov. “It was not he who killed my father,” Alyosha insists, and when asked for evidence, he only says: “I saw by his face he was not lying to me.” The narrator of The Brothers Karamazov calls Alyosha his “hero”, and I wonder if it’s in part because of this clear-sightedness: that Alyosha knows the truth simply by looking at Mitya’s face. Against “psychology, medicine, logic” and all the facts and evidence that seem heaped against Mitya, Alyosha knows, and he doesn’t need to conjecture as Fetyukovich does. He simply knows, by reading Mitya’s face.

In my mind, that moment contrasts with another, earlier scene. When Alyosha goes to visit Mitya in his cell, Mitya relates a conversation with Rakitin:

“The fact is…on the whole…I’m sorry for God, that’s why!”

“What do you mean, sorry for God?”

“Imagine: it’s all there in the nerves, in the head, there are these nerves in the brain (devil take them!)…there are little sorts of tails, these nerves have little tails, well, and when they start trembling there..that is, you see, I look at something with my eyes, like this, and they start trembling, these little tails..and when they tremble, an image appears, not at once, but in a moment, it takes a second, and then a certain moment appears, as it were, that is, not a moment—devil take the moment—but an image, that is, an object or an event, well, devil take it—and that’s why I contemplate, and then think…because of the little tails, and not at all because I have a soul or am some sort of image and likeness, that’s all foolishness. Mikhail explained it to me, brother, just yesterday, and it was as if I got burnt. It’s magnificent, Alyosha, this science! The new man will come, I quite understand that..And yet, I’m sorry for God!”

Rakitin has introduced Mitya to materialism: the idea that consciousness is a mere function of our neurons. Reason is the product of nerves in the brain, not the image of God in man. And God himself is called into question by the principles of materialism: everything must be judged by reason and the methods of science; we can only trust what we can measure, analyze, and prove to exist; since we cannot prove that God exists, there is no rational basis for belief. But if God does not exist, “everything is permitted”—or so Ivan says, and his words echo throughout the book. What is knowable? What is moral? What is man? Mitya’s trial reflects what the whole world experienced at the time: a courtroom, in which evidence was weighed and sifted, again and again, in the clash of ideas.

None of Dostoevsky’s characters are free from this courtroom of ideas; rather, they’re defined by it. Alyosha is tormented by doubt after the death of Father Zossima, just as, for a single moment, he wonders if Mitya did kill their father. The witnesses and lawyers at Mitya’s trial try to out-do each other with their scientific or psychological insights; Rakitin embraces materialism and socialism; Mitya’s response to Rakitin’s “nerves with tails” is to pity the god he’s displaced; Fyodor Pavlovich, we are told, is a cynic; Ivan is his intellectual heir, the atheistic skeptic of moral conventions, whose ideas Smerdyakov claims to adopt. Even the boy Kolya is swept into the stream, as he memorizes bits and pieces of the books found in his father’s library. Everyone in the novel is living a trial of ideas, and so Mitya is not the only one in the dock.

As I reread The Brothers Karamazov, a quote from G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday kept coming to mind:

“Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front—”

Everything is stooping and hiding a face. “I saw by his face he was not lying to me.” What does it mean to see the face of something? What does looking into the face of the world tell us about its truth? Alyosha is right, even when the whole court pronounces Mitya guilty, because he knows him. He weighs his judgement of his brother more than the apparent facts. Chesterton asks: is the world confused, or are we looking at things from the wrong angle? And I have to wonder, if that’s the case, what might it look like for us to try and see the face of the world?

I think we get a hint from Dmitri Karamazov. It looks like being a lover of life. Mitya’s “Karamazov unrestraint” propels him into everything: he loves Grushenka, loves money, loves poetry, loves drinking, loves Alyosha. He hates, too: hates his father, hates the shame of his interrogation, hates the thought that, though a self-admitted scoundrel, he could ever be considered a thief and murderer. But even his hate springs from the love of something else, whether noble or base. Everything is a headlong rush for him, whether to “the abyss above or below,” but because he loves so much, he is the opposite of Smerdyakov, who “loved no one but himself”, and not even himself enough to be tethered to the world, for after he tells everything to Ivan, he commits suicide.

For Ivan, too, it is the love of life—“the sticky green leaves, the blue sky”—that may someday end his trial of ideas, the parallel lines that cannot meet. He says that he accepts God, but not his world, and yet he must accept some of it, for nobody loves what they wholly reject; he accepts it, even if he doesn’t understand it, even if he only sees the brutal back of it. Like Mitya, his love for life is an uncalculated force, an intense ecstasy over things themselves. As he tells Alyosha, “It’s not a matter of intellect or logic—it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach.”

Ayosha’s response is my favorite passage from the novel.

“I think that everyone should love life before everything else in the world… Certainly, love it before logic, as you say, certainly before logic, and only then will I also understand its meaning. That is how I’ve long imagined it. Half your work is done and acquired, Ivan: you love life. Now you need only apply yourself to the second half, and you are saved.”

Love life it before its meaning. Or perhaps, to say it differently: look at its face and judge by that, despite the evidence.

It is with this love of life that Dostoevsky ends his novel. As Alyosha gathers with the schoolboys after Ilyusha’s funeral, he charges them to remember Ilyusha and their friendship with him, as “one good memory”; no matter how bad they may become someday, he says, they will have that memory to return to.

One good memory to counterbalance all wickedness. It is in such little things, in budding leaves, and childhood memories, and moments of falling in love, or remembering joy, or finding friendship, that we catch glimpses of the true face of the world. As Chesterton says elsewhere:

“We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.”

“For one awful instant”—as if the shock of one small glimpse of the world’s face were wine too strong for us to taste. But then, Alyosha knows Mitya’s innocence, not by the evidence against him, but by his face. Perhaps only a glance is necessary.

I look up. The snow has stopped and the sunlight faded. In the dusk, the heaps of snow are tinted blue. The cat’s tracks are almost covered now; only a shallow curve dents the snow where she earlier carved her way. The stump where she sometimes sits is covered; so is the neighbor’s roof; so are the birch trees beside the house. I’ve finished The Brothers Karamazov and have to laugh: I set out to read it like any other novel, trying not to take it too seriously, and yet, it seems to have set deeper roots inside me than before. I care more about the characters this time, all of them, but especially Mitya. His story—all their stories—recast my own, recolor it, like the blueness of the snow. Whether I “got” the novel, this time through, I can’t say, but it left an even deeper imprint than before. In reading, then, as with everything, meaning unfolds alongside love.