A New Word on The Brothers Karamazov

Did Dostoevsky or Tolstoy Believe in Miracles?

Donna Orwin Did Dostoevsky or Tolstoy Believe in Miracles? SÉANCES AND MEDIUMS claiming to be in contact with the dead were very fashionable in the 1870s among the educated Russian public. Within the context of larger debates of that time, spiritualism had a weightiness and plausibility not apparent when we view it in isolation. In the United States, where the modern spiritualist movement had arisen in 1848, the eminent philosopher and scientist William James investigated it in the 1890s and found its claims to be valid.1 Two scientists at the University of St. Petersburg, chemist A. M. Butlerov and zoologist N. P. Vagner, spearheaded the spiritualist movement in the 1870s in Russia.2 In polemics of the time, the chief antagonist of these two was N. N. Strakhov, a close friend of both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.3 Philosopher V. S. Soloviev, a prot égé of Strakhov and a friend of Dostoevsky, met his philosophical mentor, P. D. Iurkevich, at a séance in 1874 and supposedly remained in communication with him after his death.4 In this climate, it is not surprising that both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy comment on the subject in their writings. For both, it is connected to the larger issue of the role of miracles and religion in the modern world. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy created a medium named Jules Landau based on a clairvoyant whom he himself had seen in Paris in 1857 and who had “conducted seances and lectures in Russia in the early 1870s.”5 When the hysterical and sexually repressed Lydia Ivanovna convinces Aleksey Karenin to consult Landau on whether he should grant Anna a divorce, Landau, whether by accident or design, obliges the secret wish of Lydia Ivanovna and Karenin to torture Anna by forbidding the divorce.6 This surrender of his conscience to a clairvoyant signals the moral bankruptcy of Karenin, who now also believes in miraculous salvation without good works or repentance. Yet it is appropriate that it is he and Lydia Ivanovna rather than Stiva Oblonsky (who is horrified by the whole event) who are drawn to spiritualism. It supplies answers, debased and compromised though they may be, to ethical questions that do not even exist for Stiva. Dostoevsky’s January 1876 Diary of a Writer included a satire on spiritualism in which he argued that the discord on this issue was sown by dev125 ils whose real existence it therefore proved.7 The implication is that the whole debate about devils and angels, if scientifically illegitimate, is psychologically and ethically understandable and sound. Dostoevsky subsequently visited a séance in February and reported on it in the Diary for March and April (Ps, 22:98–101, 126–32). This séance, with its concealed springs and wires, as he explained in April, deprived him of any wish he might have had to believe in spiritualism and therefore any possibility that he might ever actually believe in it. Although spiritualism itself is not a topic in The Brothers Karamazov, as it is in Anna Karenina, the issues with which Dostoevsky associates it in his three issues of the Diary are. Both the erstwhile existence of devils and the relation between a wish to believe and the possibility of religious belief become important themes in the novel. The malicious and prideful monk Ferapont sees devils because he wants to, and Alyosha believes both in God and in miracles because he is temperamentally inclined to do so. Given Dostoevsky’s forceful denunciation of spiritualism in the April Diary, it is striking that it includes an important caveat. He tells his readers that “even now,” despite his resolute rejection of spiritualism, he does not deny the possibility of “spiritualist phenomena” [spiritskie iavleniia]: in other words, he does not think that these “phenomena,” of which he has had some personal experience, can simply be disproved by the learned commissions currently investigating séances (Ps, 22:127). Spiritualism interested Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as psychologists and moralists because it expressed at one and the same time the spiritual poverty of contemporary life and a suppressed longing for spirituality. Both Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov locate the cause of spiritual impoverishment in modern scientific thought; and both novels contain experiences that cannot be explained “scientifically.” In this essay, I will explore the status of the miraculous in the two novels with an eye, finally, to defining what kind of “spiritual phenomena,” if any, the two writers might have regarded as real. In both...