A New Word on The Brothers Karamazov

Alyosha’s Speech at the Stone: “The Whole Picture”

Robert Louis Jackson Alyosha’s Speech at the Stone: “The Whole Picture” This is rapture, the ecstasy of faith, forgiving all and embracing all. Let us strongly embrace, kiss one another, and start anew as brothers. . . . Indeed I know that there is nothing higher than this thought of embracing. —From Dostoevsky’s notebook, April 1876 (Ps, 24:202) Ivan Fyodorovich [Karamazov] is profound. He’s not one of your contemporary atheists, demonstrating in his lack of faith merely the narrowness of his worldview and the dullness of his own dull-witted abilities. . . . The scoundrels ridiculed me for an ignorant and a retrograde faith in God. These blockheads never dreamed of such a powerful negation of God as that put in the Inquisitor and in the preceding chapter, to which the whole novel serves as an answer. But I do not believe in God like a fool, a fanatic. And they wished to teach me, and laughed over my backwardness. But their stupid natures did not even dream of such a powerful negation as I have lived through. It is for them to teach me.1 Here we have a remarkable statement by an author in his notebook about his creation. He is immensely proud of the profundity and power of his hero’s “negation of God”; indeed, he identifies his own spiritual trials with his hero’s experience. At the same time he informs us that “the whole novel serves as an answer” to that negation of God. Critical interpretation of The Brothers Karamazov, whatever else it does, must ultimately be concerned with the question of how and in what way the “whole novel,” as Dostoevsky puts it, seeks to “answer” Ivan’s negation . Seeks—because where we are involved with Dostoevsky versus Dostoevsky —and that is almost always the case in his major novels—there is not likely to be an answer, or voice, that definitively drowns out the other contending voices.2 As in a symphony or chorus, however, there are dominants and directions, and a sense of the whole picture. That whole picture constitutes a point of view. The novel, in its artistic unity, it might be said, knows where it is going. 234 In any case, one of the answers to Ivan’s “negation of God” is Alyosha: his life, his experience, his moral-spiritual drama. To each of the Karamazov sons is granted a speech, a discourse, or a declamation that is emblematic of his ache. Alyosha’s speech at the very end of the novel certainly embodies much that is dear to Dostoevsky. This speech is by no means the answer that the “whole novel” gives. Yet as Dostoevsky himself remarks in the preface to The Brothers Karamazov, one devoted to “my hero, Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov”: “it sometimes happens that precisely [an odd hero like Alyosha] . . . bears within himself the heart of the whole, while the other people of his epoch have all for some reason been torn away from it for a time by some kind of flooding wind.”3 Alyosha Karamazov’s “speech at the stone,” that is, his speech at the spot the boy Ilyusha wanted himself buried, a place of sacred memory for Ilyusha, his school friends, and Alyosha, was certainly designed by Dostoevsky to contain the “heart of the whole.” This speech appears at the very end of The Brothers Karamazov, at the conclusion of chapter 3 of the novel’s epilogue; indeed, it may be said to constitute the end of the novel: for we must bear in mind that the speech flows into the novel’s last passage, one that consists of some thirty lines, given over to intermingling voices (among them Aloshya’s own voice), responding to and recapitulating the great themes of Alyosha’s speech: remembrance, reconciliation, and the idea of universal brotherhood in heaven and on earth. Thus the novel is framed, literally and thematically, by what we might call the Alyosha motif: Dostoevsky’s remarks on his hero in the novel’s preface or prologue (“From the Author”) and his hero’s own remarks at the end of the epilogue. What lies in between, of course, is the whole novel, or what Dostoevsky termed the “flooding wind” of the epoch. Ivan Karamazov’s “rebellion,” certainly the eye of the storm in The Brothers Karamazov, serves as a useful point of departure for a discussion of Alyosha’s speech. Ivan’s speech comes at the end of a long and discouraging discourse on human...