A New Word on The Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov Today

Robin Feuer Miller The Brothers Karamazov Today Dostoevsky is our great contemporary. —Octavio Paz1 “READING AS IF FOR LIFE” The extraordinary collection of essays in this volume is The Brothers Karamazov today. The student who lamented that reading The Brothers Karamazov is like carrying nine bags of groceries is The Brothers Karamazov today; so is the young man sitting at the back of the classroom who starts wiping his eyes. The novel reaches into our hearts, challenges our theories, subverts cherished beliefs, and, even as it cannot firmly answer the questions it poses, offers up a comfort that is not cold, not lukewarm, but hot. The words of W. H. Auden come to mind: O look, look in the mirror, O look in your distress; Life remains a blessing Although you cannot bless. O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked neighbor With your crooked heart.2 In 1849, when Dostoevsky traveled through the streets of St. Petersburg on his way to what he thought was his execution, his musings about his life merged with thoughts about his reading, most specifically with Victor Hugo. We can be almost certain of this.3 How many generations of us will continue to experience that same fusion of life and art at similarly critical moments? What fragment of this particular novel, what seed, will lodge in each of us to take root at some later time? The essays in this volume will surely contribute to richer, more fruitful readings of this novel, to the sprouting of plants most of us had not noticed growing within it or within ourselves before. None of the essays included here succumbs to the temptation of pretending to be new simply by giving old responses contrived, pseudotheoretical names. These essays reflect the jagged immediacy of a group of adventuresome, informed encounters with Dostoevsky’s final novel. 3 A work such as The Brothers Karamazov, which has engaged each successive generation since its writing, suggests a series of answers to the question, “Why do we read?” We read to lose ourselves in plots, to find ourselves in characters, to overhear answers to the big questions, to laugh or to cry, to reenact, as complex reading beings, individual, social, and moral dilemmas. Such reasons for reading are axiomatic, automatic, and not terribly compelling, though reading itself is. Great novels, like great teachers, do not teach us to answer questions but to find a way to pose them. In my view the quintessential impulse toward reading is as uncertain as it is to describe both the position and the trajectory of a single electron. As readers, we seek to have an emotionally intimate encounter with the text as well as to generate a cool appraisal of its trajectory within theoretical, formal, critical, cultural, and historical contexts. But in any given moment, a reader experiences one kind of reading at the expense of the other. Early on in David Copperfield (1849–50), a novel Dostoevsky knew and loved, in a little room adjoining his own, the mistreated and neglected David discovers—to borrow Tsvetaeva’s haunting phrase—his childhood bookshelf, which is in fact really the collection of his dead father’s books. He begins feverishly to read, and soon he is reading, as the adult David narrator (and through him, Dickens himself) tells us “as if for life.”4 We read “as if for life.” Such reading is both a complete immersion in the act itself and a contemplation of it. Paradoxically, however, the more we are immersed , the less accurately can we contemplate what we are reading, and the more we contemplate, the less actively can we be immersed. This uncertainty principle is, in its totality, the act of reading itself, and why we read “as if for life.” Dostoevsky trembled for his novel, especially book 6, as he worked on it.5 Following Dostoevsky’s lead, we usually take this to mean: “Will the rebuttals to the Grand Inquisitor’s arguments which are put forth in the book of the novel entitled ‘The Russian Monk’ be sufficient? Are these refutations too indirect, too subtly represented to stand up to the eloquence, the passion, the sheer power of the discourse of Ivan’s rebellion and his poem?” Caryl Emerson offers us a different understanding of Dostoevsky’s trembling at this point—an answer for today. Indeed, Emerson’s essay, like others in the volume, suggests a reading so new that it...