A Short Discussion of Brothers Karamazov, plus Benjamin Franklin

“…we need first of all to resolve the everlasting questions, that is what concerns us.  All of young Russia is talking only now only about the eternal questions.”  (Ivan Karamazov)

“Western society is more pragmatic.  Russian people think more about the eternal, about moral values.”  (Vladimir Putin)

My essay is occasioned by a fine St John’s seminar which allowed me to re-read Brothers Karamazov for the first time in decades.  I have been a long-time watcher of Russia in its various modern guises and was grateful for the in-depth discussions.

This is quite a long book and has occasioned its share of equally long commentaries.  This will be short.

Dostoevsky shows us characters who live on the edge, emotionally and psychologically.  The ones he admires are those who suffer, who go through a dark night of the soul, and as a result are able to have  ecstatic experiences of love, God’s presence, and repentance.  The best of the three brothers, Alyosha, has his moment when his faith in his elder, Father Zosima, is shaken after his death by the smell of corruption; Alyosha sulks about, has a dramatic encounter with the town’s loose woman, and ends up face down on the earth overcome by God’s creation.  Zosima himself tells us of his turn to God when, during his military service, he accepts a duel but recoils at killing, throws away his pistol and becomes a monk.  

Dmitry, Alyosha’s often boorish and violent half-brother, turns to the light only after deciding to kill himself when his amour, Grushenka, appears to have left him forever but then unexpectedly accepts his love.  At the end of the novel, Alyosha creates a life-changing moment for a group of young boys who experience the death of a beloved schoolmate.  

A question is, what is the lasting effect of these moments of darkness followed by ecstasy and redemption?  Do they bring about a ‘new man’ who treats his fellows with kindness, who works for justice, who seeks to alleviate human suffering?  That is not clear.  Dmitry in particular continues to lose his temper and fight jealously with Grushenka, and vice versa.  

Dostoevsky’s foil throughout Brothers is modern, European, Enlightenment thinking and mores.  The advances of science and the dream of making the human condition better through planning and reforms and, God help us, socialism are roundly scorned and made fun of.  This way of thinking leads to atheism, the collapse of all morals (“everything is permitted”!), and alienation from our fellow man.

Wanting to better mankind in this way is a fatal temptation.  The famous tale of the “Grand Inquisitor,” where the Inquisitor faces down Christ himself in the name of making ordinary humans happy, shows that this is the work (literally) of the Devil, leading to spiritual death and brutal oppression.  

Dostoyevsky has a penetrating portrayal of Kolya, a promising boy who is at risk of being taken over by these ugly modern forces but is fortunately turned to the light by Alyosha.  Kolya is prone to trying to impress those around him by repeating half-digested bits of modernity, gleaned from journals, overheard conversations, and Rakitin, the town’s village atheist.  During one of these discourses he asserts “Everything is habit with people, everything, even state and political relations.  Habit is the chief motive force.”  This would seem to be a central tenet of our modern, Enlightenment view of human nature; we are bundles of habits, who can be changed for the better by inculcating new, better habits.

Whether Dostoyevsky means us to think of Aristotle or not, this statement brought me up short.  Aristotle famously told us in the Ethics that moral virtue is a matter of habits.  We acquire the moral virtues—courage, prudence, temperance, justice, magnanimity—because we have nurtured and practiced them until they have become a second nature.  The virtues are means between extremes, and a virtuous person would generally display a calm strength and predictability in behavior. 

This is not how Dostoyevsky seems to see a good life.  We need to be open to wild swings of mood and activity by remaining emotionally honest (like children, who Dostoyevsky sees as innocents who can be models to us as we grow up, retaining the memory of our younger selves).  No pain, no gain.  The sign of a good soul does not seem to be the equanimity that comes from well-established habits.  No one in Brothers is an example of such a life.  We are not in it for the long haul, but for the experiences of love and ecstasy that illuminate life like lightning flashes.  

Brothers might be said to have a ‘missing middle’.  There is penetrating attention to individual struggles and psychology, and also to the highest spiritual and religious experiences.  There is little said or portrayed that might be called ordinary life, including public life.  No one gets married and settles down and has a job and raises a family.  No one works hard in the town council to pave the streets and start a fire department.   The main characters are members of Russia’s newly emerging, educated, well-to-do, Western-oriented middle class.  But the Karamazovs at least remain the kind of Russians that Ivan describes to Alyosha when they settle in for a brotherly heart-to-heart:  “…we need first of all to resolve the everlasting questions, that is what concerns us.  All of young Russia is talking only now only about the eternal questions.”  And Alyosha agrees:  “Yes, for real Russians the questions of the existence of God and immortality, or, as you just said, the same questions from the other end, are of course first and foremost, and they should be.”  

It goes without saying that this Russian orientation to the ‘eternal questions’ is in contrast to the self-absorbed pragmatism of non-Russians, in the West.  Dostoyevsky is aware that this Russian trait is already by now something of a caricature, but he defends it nevertheless.  When Alyosha is bantering with young Kolya, he tells a German joke about Russians:  “Show a Russian schoolboy a map of the heavens, of which hitherto he had no idea at all, and the next day he will return it to you with corrections!”  To which Kolya retorts “Bravo, German!  However the Kraut didn’t look at the good side, what do you think?  Conceit—so be it, it comes from youth, it will correct itself…but on the other hand, an independent spirit, almost from childhood, a boldness of thought and conviction, and not the spirit of those sausage-makers groveling before the authorities…”  

Bold-thinking Russians who go straight to the eternal questions, who embrace suffering as the price for a meaningful life, these are Dostoyevsky’s heroes.  By now this image of the ‘real Russian’ has been deeply implanted, both in Russians and non-Russians—in no small part by Dostoyevsky himself.  However much Russians may see themselves outdone in the mundane world by the West, they see themselves as superior in their souls.  Dostoyevsky’s own prescient warnings about where too much ‘socialism’ might lead were on the mark for Russia itself, where Lenin and Stalin took Marx and melded him with Dostoyevskian excess to create a real-world version of the “Grand Inquisitor.”  Russian floundering and brutality have brought untold suffering down on their own heads, and the heads of those around them, but this is waved off as a necessary part of the national character.  

Today unfortunately Russia has again missed the chance to become a normal nation; again there is a ‘missing middle’.  Instead Putin and his minions have appropriated a distorted Dostoyevsky to teach a new generation that Russia has a special mission in the world, a spiritual mission that requires sacrifice,  submission, war, and the conquering of neighbors.  In his February 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson, Putin channels Dostoyevsky:  “Western society is more pragmatic,” he said. “Russian people think more about the eternal, about moral values.”

Shortly after reading Brothers I watched a recent Ken Burns documentary on Benjamin Franklin.  If Dostoyevsky provides a lasting model for Russia, so Franklin has done for America.  The differences, of course, could not be greater.  Franklin is among other things the greatest proponent among our Founders for the middle class, for the artisans, small businessmen, immigrant strivers, self-made thinkers and doers who the new nation is made for.  Self-discipline and concern for one’s community are Franklin’s touchstones for a good life.  Franklin creates institutions the way Johnny Appleseed plants trees:  libraries, postal services, schools, fire-departments spring up in his wake wherever he goes.  He was a relentless tinkerer, an improver, a reluctant Revolutionary.  Not for him the Eternal Questions.

American success has come from this focus on the middle.  Creating and nurturing this segment of society has been the true American achievement and our true radicalism.   We have gone astray when we tilt towards the greatly rich, the greatly charismatic, the greatly ambitious, the greatly religious.

Dostoyevskian characters are not missing in America, far from it, but their suffering and spiritual striving has for the most part remained private.  They have been kept far away from the levers of power.  May it remain so.