A New Word on The Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov Tomorrow

William Mills Todd III The Brothers Karamazov Tomorrow NEARLY A CENTURY and a quarter after the novel’s first installments began to appear in The Russian Herald, we have learned to read The Brothers Karamazov very differently from its first reviewers. But not entirely. The essays in this volume work their way through the novel, from the author’s opening challenge to Alyosha’s concluding speech. In doing so, they parallel the initial reviews, which followed the course of the novel’s serialization in 1879 and 1880. Like the first reviews, these essays draw on a wide variety of contexts to illuminate the unfolding novel: Dostoevsky’s prior fiction and journalism, the writing of Dostoevsky’s contemporaries , and the state of Russian culture.1 But these new studies explore some topics, such as sexuality, that were not widely discussed in the literary criticism of the 1870s; they can draw upon fields of scholarship, such as cognitive psychology, as yet unfounded in Dostoevsky’s time. And unlike the first reviews, which were largely shaped by realist aesthetics and social interests, these take the novel’s religious and spiritual dimension very seriously. Hindsight is, of course, invaluable. The Orthodox revival, in which this novel was a significant early landmark, was only commencing as the novel appeared, and we have access to much that the reviewers lacked, including Dostoevsky’s own correspondence about pivotal moments in The Brothers Karamazov, books 5 (“Pro and Contra”) and 6 (“The Russian Monk”). That modern academic readers should approach the text from different viewpoints and for different purposes than the newspaper critics of the 1870s is, of course, not surprising. They are not providing consumer advice for potential readers of an unknown fiction so much as helping readers of a universally esteemed canonical text understand its intricate textual patterns and contextual linkings. They are not encountering a partly published text for the first time but have, in all likelihood, often read and taught it. Hindsight and canonical approval enable and compel scholars to find the coherence and creative energy that an unfriendly contemporary reviewer found lacking in Dostoevsky’s “weird and flaccid” novel.2 Robert Louis Jackson asserts a hermeneutical principle that has become axiomatic for most modern 254 readers, including the contributors to this volume: “[T]he novel in its artistic unity knows where it is going.” We know where it is going because for us, unlike for the reviewers, it has already gone there. And, when the way seems unclear, canonicity compels us to doubt ourselves and not the text, to engage our fullest powers of interpretation and our fullest scholarly resources for contextualization. Just as a completed novel provides us the opportunity for learned and imaginative interpretation and canonical status provides the motive, a century of literary theory offers the means. While the essays in this volume are not obsessed with theory—indeed, the few references are typically critical ones—and while they are written by scholars of varying backgrounds and interests, nevertheless most, if not all, show the impact of those twentiethcentury approaches (e.g., New Criticism, text-immanent criticism, readerresponse theory, Bakhtinian discourse analysis, semiotics), which taught us to read closely for textual patterns and, as Horst-Jürgen Gerigk puts it in his essay, to take things for signs. The essays in this volume propose readings dazzling for their attentiveness to details (the “open” door, Dmitri’s ladonka, Grushenka’s onion), relatively peripheral characters (Grigory, Richard, Captain Snegiryov, Kalganov) and heretofore overlooked incidents, passages, or fragments of dialogue. They give Smerdyakov his rightful status as a major and troublingly enigmatic character. They refer to all the members of the Holy Trinity, including the often neglected Holy Spirit. Eschewing radically deconstructive, psychoanalytic, or sociological methods, the authors of these essays have generally used those modern approaches which were most directly linked with the traditions of philosophical aesthetics and Christian thought that were familiar to Dostoevsky and the most literate of his reviewers . In this sense, the essays embody on a critical and analytic level the search for coherence, meaning, and harmony that animated the novel’s characters, early reviewers, and—judging from his letters as well as from the novel’s inner intentionality (Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck)—its author. But the search for meaning and harmony, for resolution, joins in these essays with a lively sense of the novel’s complexity. At various moments, the essayists treat the novel in terms of a wide range of genres (poetry, narrative , parody, confession, detective...