Table Of ContentA New Word on The Brothers Karamazov
Northwestern University Press
Studies in Russian Literature and Theory
Founding Editor
Gary Saul Morson
General Editor
Caryl Emerson
Consulting Editors
Carol Avins
Robert Belknap
Robert Louis Jackson
Elliott Mossman
Alfred Rieber
William Mills Todd III
Alexander Zholkovsky
A New Word on
The Brothers Karamazov
Edited by Robert Louis Jackson
With an introductory essay by Robin Feuer Miller
and a concluding one by William Mills Todd III
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS / EVANSTON, ILLINOIS
Northwestern University Press
Evanston, Illinois 60208-4210
Copyright © 2004 by Northwestern University Press.
Published 2004. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 0-8101-1949-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data are available from the Library of
Congress.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the Ameri
can National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Truth dawns in adversity.
—Fyodor M. Dostoevsky
Contents
Preface ix
List of Abbreviations xi
The Brothers Karamazov Today 3
Robin Feuer Miller
Refiguring the Russian Type: Dostoevsky and the Limits
of Realism 17
Robert Bird
Mothers and Sons in The Brothers Karamazov: Our Ladies
of Skotoprigonevsk 31
Liza Knapp
Shame’s Rhetoric, or Ivan’s Devil, Karamazov Soul 53
Deborah A. Martinsen
Two Fates: Zosima’s Bow and What Rakitin Said 68
Tatyana Buzina
Struggle for Theosis: Smerdyakov as Would-Be Saint 74
Lee D. Johnson
Accidental Families and Surrogate Fathers: Richard, Grigory,
and Smerdyakov 90
Vladimir Golstein
The God of Onions: The Brothers Karamazov
and the Mythic Prosaic 107
Gary Saul Morson
Did Dostoevsky or Tolstoy Believe in Miracles? 125
Donna Orwin
The Sexuality of the Male Virgin: Arkady in A Raw Youth
and Alyosha Karamazov 142
Susanne Fusso
Zosima’s “Mysterious Visitor”: Again Bakhtin on Dostoevsky,
and Dostoevsky on Heaven and Hell 155
Caryl Emerson
Dostoevsky—Genius of Evocation: The Scene of Fyodor
Karamazov s Murder and Its Symbolic Topography 180
Horst-Jürgen Gerigk
The Legend of the Ladonka and the Trial of the Novel 192
Kate Holland
Sensual Mind: The Pain and Pleasure of Thinking 200
Marina Kostalevsky
The Jewish Question and The Brothers Karamazov 210
Maxim D. Shrayer
Alyosha’s Speech at the Stone: ‘The Whole Picture” 234
Robert Louis Jackson
The Brothers Karamazov Tomorrow 254
William Mills Todd HI
Preface
It has been said that the great Gothic cathedral, an example of which is to
be found in the thirteenth-century Cathedral of Our Lady at Chartres, can
never be seen or fully taken in from any single perspective or in any given
light; it is manifold and changing from every point of view. The same may
be said of The Brothers Karamazov, a work that breathes not the spirit of
sublime belief but a God-tormented one, a spirit groping for faith.
The Brothers Karamazov stands like Chartres Cathedral. It is a work
to be read, experienced, seen from many angles. Critical and scholarly lit
erature cannot substitute for the reading of the novel. It can only suggest
points of view: ways of looking, paths to an understanding of the workings
of the novel as an artistic text, of its moral, psychological, and philosophical
complexities and crises, of its constant search for foundations.
What marks the writings in this volume is the comprehensive nature of
their grasp of Dostoevsky: on the one hand, an understanding of his artistic
thought, his psychological insights, and the artistic means and materials he
brings to bear on his work; on the other, a recognition of the value-oriented
nature of everything that comprises his artistic effort.
“I want to speak out as passionately as possible,” Dostoevsky wrote in
connection with his novel The Demons. “I want to speak out to the last word
. . . even if my artistry perishes in so doing . . . but I will speak my mind.”
The paradox here is that his passionate ethical and social intensity—the
kind that in a lesser writer often renders the artistic endeavor lifeless—
always resulted in a furious energizing of artistic thought and a revolution
ary impetus toward new forms of artistic expression.
A unity of aesthetic and ethical purpose was typical of almost ail of
major Russian literature of the nineteenth century. “Depend upon it, the
first universal characteristic of all great art is Tenderness as the second is
Truth,” wrote the English critic John Ruskin. As though reformulating his
thought, one of Dostoevsky’s characters in The Idiot remarks reproachfully
to another: “You have no tenderness: only truth; hence you are unjust” (U
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