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The Covert Design of The Brothers Karamazov: Alesha's Pathology and Dialectic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Abstract
A future revolutionary, Alesha Karamazov is, at nineteen, an inexperienced boy who lives in a monastery and who has been considered strange since birth. Fedor Dostoevskii endows him with hysteria—then a serious psychopathology with convulsions that were clinically seen as analogous to epilepsy, the morbus sacer from which Dostoevskii himself suffered. Recognized as an epidemic problem, hysteria in this novel is elaborately deployed as a symbol of Russia's social ills and the underlying cause of farreaching personality changes in Alesha (for better or worse), preparing him for a heroic destiny. Although hysteria was soon altered and later eliminated as a clinical syndrome, James L. Rice enables us to read the novel for the first time in the light of documented medical history.
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References
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44. PSS, 14:45; cf. 14:456 (kakie-tokorichnevyeunikhlitsa). This feature is at once clinical and iconic.
45. PSS, 15:21. Arson was a frequent act of anarchy in Russia, especially after the Petersburg fires of 1862. Rozenblium, N. G., “Peterburgskie pozhary 1862 g. i Dostoevskii,“ Literaturnoenasledstvo 86 (1973): 16–54 Google Scholar.
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50. PSS, 14:126.
51. Ibid.
52. PSS, 14:216.
53. PSS, 14:221. Here we may anticipate the embellishment of Ivan's image, besenok, arching over more than 300 pages of text, to a chapter titled “Besenok” (usually translated as “The Little Demon“), which is a nickname bestowed by Ivan on the hysteric Lise, whose tales of atrocity that bludgeon Alesha not only resemble the devil's advocacy of Ivan, but are in some instances inspired by him. Alesha and Lise were destined, according to one plausibly informed source, to marry in the sequel. Typical of Dostoevskii's literary technique is the projection of a hero's quality into an allegory, and its dramatic interplay in a realistic plot. Ivan manipulates both Lise and Alesha with his demonic force.
54. PSS, 14:241.
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57. Book 7 of The Brothers Karamazovwas sent to the printer on 1 October 1879.
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66. Odesskaia, M., ed. and intro., “Ustnyi rasskaz F. M. Dostoevskogo: Iz arkhiva E. N. Opochinina,” Novyi mir, 1992, no. 8: 211-17 (on Merzheevskii, see 213-214n)Google Scholar. Dostoevskii tells his memoirist of a Petersburg necrophile (whether fantasy or real) who sneaks into funerals to plant long deep kisses on the mouths of deceased adolescent beauties. The memoirist is forced to exclaim: “Such monsters … should be annihilated!” For all the world like Alesha Karamazov's verdict, “Shoot him!” (revealing the demonic principle in his heart). Ibid., 217.
67. Verkhovskii, Iu., ed. and intro., “Besedy s Dostoevskim: Zapisi i pripominaniia E. N. Opochinina,” Zven'ia (Moscow-Leningrad, 1936), 6:454-94Google Scholar, esp. 474. Cf. an early example from the fiction: Unizhennyei oskorblennye (1861-62), pt. 3, chap. 10, PSS, 3:361- 62)—echoed by Zapiski izpodpol'ia (1866), PSS, 5:104, 128.
68. Odesskaia, ed. and intro., “Ustnyi rasskaz,” 217.
69. PSS, 14:315. Grushenka assumes he means old Karamazov.
70. PSS, 14:307-8. Emphasis in the original.
71. PSS, 14:131.
72. PSS, 14:318.
73. PSS, 14:323-24. For another view of the, after all, beguiling Grushenka, see Friedrich, Paul, “Grushenka,” Dostoevsky Studies, n.s. 6 (2007): 38–55 Google Scholar.
74. PSS, 14:323-27.
75. PSS, 14:328. Emphasis added.
76. “The term hysterical neurosis is currently restricted to individuals who show varying degrees of selective inattention to particular elements of their internal or external environment, as manifested by conversion symptoms and such symptoms of dissociation as fugue states, amnesia, and multiple personality.” Detre, and Jarecki, , Modern Psychiatric Treatment, 222 Google Scholar. Symptomatic forgetting by hysterics is also noted, more than once, by Krafft-Ebing, , Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie, 2:117 Google Scholar.
77. PSS, 14:328. Interpretation of this passage as a purely religious epiphany has recently been argued by Kate Holland, “Novelizing Religious Experience: The Generic Landscape of The Brothers Karamazov,” Slavic Review 66, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 63 - 81.
78. John 12:24. PSS, 14:328. These words may also conjure the idea of the hero's sacrificial destiny in the cause of revolution.
79. PSS, 14:328.
80. Krafft-Ebing, , Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie, 2:117 Google Scholar. Leonid Grossman, the leading Dostoevskii scholar of the Soviet era, commented on the description of Alesha's euphoria in quasi-medical terms that deserve to be recalled here: “Dostoevskii's language with its excitability is distinguished by its exceptional emotionality and a purely epileptic capability of illuminating the most knotty contours to lend the whole design a sharp clarity.” His example is Alesha's ecstatic vision of earth and heaven merging. Grossman, , Seminarii po Dostoevskomu (Moscow, 1923), 81 Google Scholar. Emphasis added.
81. At the time of the first installment, it would be 1879. The first complete edition, a huge and immediate success, appeared on 9 December 1880.
82. Kolia, as Leonid Grossman observed, is “obviously an embryonic revolutionary“ yet positively portrayed, not satirically as hitherto by Dostoevskii (e.g., in “The Eternal Husband” or The Devils). Grossman, “Dostoevskii i pravitel'stvennye krugi 1870kh godov,“ Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 1934, no. 16:107. If the hysteric Lise becomes Alesha's wife, she will presumably complicate die illness of the hysteric son of a hysteric modier. See Hoffmann, Th. M. Dostojewski, and Diane Oenning Thompson, “Lise Khokhlakova: shalunia i besenok,“ in Karlinsky, Simon et al., eds., O RUS! Studia litteraria slavica in honorem Hugh McLean (Oakland, Calif., 1995), 281-97Google Scholar.
83. Z, “Zhurnal'nye zametki,” Novorossiiskii telegraf, 26 May/7 June 1880, 1. This featured review was probably scheduled to coincide with the opening of die Pushkin festival in Moscow, postponed because of die death of the Empress Mariia, Alexander II's wife.
84. Ibid. Emphasis added. The closing ellipses are Z's, ending his paragraph.
85. One here recalls, too, Carus's remarkable suggestion that “amidst the fantasies and delirium of humanity's developmental ills, from time to time truly great ideas flash through like lightning [im Einzelnen blitzartig audi von wahrhaft grossen Idem, durchzuckte].“ Carus, Ueber Geistes-Epidemien der Menschheit, 55.
86. Rice, “Dostoevsky's Endgame,” 50 Google Scholar.
87. “He perishes for the sake of others, whom he bears in his soul and to whom Russia's future belongs.” Hoffmann, Th. M. Dostojewski, 427 Google Scholar.
88. Z, “Zhurnal'nye zametki,” In this context, iurodivyi does not mean a “holy fool,“ the prophetic peasant type in tsarist Russia, usually itinerant, superstitiously regarded by many of all social classes, but rather the first definition in the Academy dictionary: “a psychically ill or unbalanced person; a madman” (mildly pejorative). Slovar’ sovremennogo russkogo literaturnogo iazyka (Leningrad, 1965), 17:2003-4Google Scholar.
89. PSS, 15:195-96.
90. PSS, 14:297. Emphasis in the original.
91. Dostoevskii was intimately involved with many sensational cases of revolutionary sedition, including his own, which led to months of solitary confinement, the firing squad, and ten years in Siberia—and he told the tale of his mock execution (brilliantly) to innumerable audiences large and small. He had bonded with the radical Nikolai Speshnev (“my Mephistopheles“), was shaken by Karakozov's act, moved by the trial of Vera Zasulich, witnessed the execution of I. O. Mlodetskii (on “his own” Semenov Square), profoundly studied Sergei Nechaev, and created Raskolnikov and Stavrogin, Kirillov, and Verkhovenskii. Permutations of Russian revolutionary types were, so to speak, legion, in life and art.
92. PSS, 8:188. On Myshkin's religious qualities, see Kiiko, E. I., “Dostoevskii i Renan,“ Dostoevskii: Materialy i issledovaniia (Leningrad, 1980), 4:106-22Google Scholar.
93. PSS, 15:485-87 (V E. Vetlovskaia's commentary on the projected sequel).
94. Luke 15:32.
95. Rice, Dostoevsky and the Healing Art, 60–81 Google Scholar.
96. Dostoevskii lacked a James Boswell, an intimate friend and chronicler who would simply revel in the multifarious quirks of his personality.
97. In the character of Smerdiakov, epilepsy is elaborately complicated by a sociopathic criminal streak, devious malingering, and cunning malice. There is, incidentally, a river Smera“near Dostoevskii's ancestral Pinsk.
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99. It has occurred to me that in these bizarre mood swings one may find an answer to the vexed question of Dostoevskii's sporadic antisemitic outbursts, often trivial and without any apparent agenda. The literature on this subject is large and inconclusive. Grossman, Leonid P., Ispovea” odnogo evreia (Moscow, 1924), especially the conciliatory afterword (which is lacking in the German edition in Freud's library)Google Scholar; Ingold, Felix P., Dostojewskij und dasjudentum (Frankfurt am Main, 1981)Google Scholar; Rice, James L., “Dostoevsky and the Jews,“ TLS (letter to the editor), 27 November 1981, 1394 Google Scholar; Rice, James L., Freud's Russia: National Identity in the Evolution of Psychoanalysis (New Brunswick, 1993)Google Scholar; Shrayer, Maxim D., “Dostoevskii, the Jewish Question, and The Brothers Karamazov,” Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 273-91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frank, Joseph, “Dostoevsky and Anti-Semitism,” in Emerson, Fleishman, , Safran, , and Wachtel, , eds., Word, Music, History, 2:433-49Google Scholar.
100. James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience, a Study in Human Nature (1902; New York, 1973), 11 (Lecture I. Religion and Neurology)Google Scholar.
101. Whelan, Dennis J., “Crime and Punishment: The Missing Insanity Defense,” in Karlinsky, et al., eds., O RUS! 270-80Google Scholar; Blagoi, D. D., “Put’ Aleshi Karamazova,” hvestiia Akademii Nauk SSSR, Seriia literatury i iazyka33, no. 1 (January-February 1974): 8–26 Google Scholar.
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