A New Word on The Brothers Karamazov

Accidental Families and Surrogate Fathers: Richard, Grigory, and Smerdyakov

Vladimir Golstein Accidental Families and Surrogate Fathers: Richard, Grigory, and Smerdyakov Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged. —Matthew 7:1 AV Woe to him who offends a child. —Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov IN 1876, DOSTOEVSKY wrote in a letter: “One of the most important problems at the present time to me, for example, is that of the younger generations and, along with it, the contemporary Russian family , which I feel is far from what it used to be even as recently as twenty years ago.”1 Indeed, from 1855 on, that is, after the death of Nicholas I and in the subsequent Great Reforms, Russia underwent a series of drastic social and economic changes that transformed beyond recognition the Russian family and the relations between generations. These changes were so momentous that the plight of the Russian family began to be perceived by Dostoevsky as “one of the most important problems” that he wanted to address . Small wonder that the novelist turned the Russian family into the subject of intense scrutiny. Not only his major novels but also A Writer’s Diary were used by Dostoevsky as a vehicle to highlight and investigate the new reality and its possible ramifications. In the January 1876 issue of A Writer’s Diary Dostoevsky confesses: For a long time now I have had the goal of writing a novel about children in Russia today, and about their fathers, too, of course, in their mutual relationship of today. . . . I will take fathers and children from every level of Russian society I can and follow the children from their earliest childhood. A year and a half ago, When Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov asked me to write a novel for Otechestvennye zapiski, I almost began my Fathers and Sons; but I held back, and thank God I did, for I was not ready. In the meantime I wrote only A Raw Youth, this first attempt at my idea.2 Of course, Dostoevsky’s view of A Raw Youth (1875) as the first sample of his idea is somewhat misleading, since The Demons (1871) seems to be directly 90 concerned with the relations between “present-day fathers and their Russian children.” Yet regardless of the first attempts at the idea, it is Dostoevsky ’s last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, that analyzes the modern-day fathers and children most intensively. The opening of the novel, the first sentence of the first chapter, announces the centrality of the father-son theme: “Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of a landowner from our district, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, well known in his own day (and still remembered among us) because of his dark and tragic death, which happened exactly thirteen years ago” (BK, 7).3 A son, a father, and a father’s tragic death are announced from the start. And so are the ideas of history and memory: the outcome of the conflict is remembered, it leaves a trace and has an impact upon others. The first line of the next chapter reinforces the centrality of the novel’s problem content, while at the same time introducing the issue of a child’s upbringing into the picture: “Of course, one can imagine what sort of father and mentor such a man would be” (BK, 10). In the opening lines of these two chapters we find the whole of Dostoevsky’s novel: fathers, sons, failed upbringing, tragic death, and the repercussions that are remembered through the years. In fact, the first book of the novel is subtitled “A Nice Little Family.” This book consists of five chapters. The first one introduces the old Karamazov , the next three chapters describe his three sons, while the last chapter switches to elders, usually addressed as “fathers” in Russian. The structure of this first book is thus rather transparent: the stories of children that are placed in the middle are surrounded by the stories of various types of fathers , either physical or surrogate, either real or failed. The novel’s progression , introduced by the first book, will be later replayed over the expanse of the whole novel. It is not the progression from fathers to sons, however, but rather the movement from false fathers to the true, usually surrogate ones; from selfishness to sacrifice, from neglect and abuse to love and engagement.4 Dostoevsky, of course, experimented with a similar progression in his previous novel, The Raw Youth. There the protagonist Arkady (a clear...