Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov: Part III

Well, it only took about 400 pages, but we've finally arrived at the heart of the story: the murder of Fyodor Karamazov and the trial of Dmitri for his murder. Additionally, we've now had a section dedicated almost exclusively to each of the three brothers: the first part belonged to Alyosha, the second to Ivan, and now it's Dmitri's turn. This section has much more action that philosophy, but don't worry, I've milked enough out of it for a post. Just one note: I know some (one) of you liked me calling Dostoevsky "Dosty," for from this post forward I'll switch to "Dusty," as I found that in one of Nabokov's discussions about Russian authors. It's much cleverer than mine, albeit more mean-spirited. 

Sensualism

With so much focus on Dmitri, we were bound to hear a great deal of sensualist rambling. It's beautiful in its own way, though, like reading bad poetry: its artlessness is evident, but we still feel pangs of understanding in its headstrong sentimentality (cf. every Taylor Swift song). We can also read Dmitri's lines as a primer on constructing sensual characters. 

Sensualists are schemers, men who would rather devise Wile E. Coyote-esque plans than take the path as the crow flies: “Like very many men in such cases, he put faith above all in change of place. If only it were not for these people, if only it were not for these circumstances, if only he could fly away from this accursed place – he would be altogether regenerated, would enter on a new path.” Again: "He gave himself up to every new idea with passionate enthusiasm." And again: “And perhaps to men of that kind in such circumstances the most impossible, fantastic schemes occur first, and seem most practical.” The fantastical is the practical to them. 

They are jealous: "Now I shall see what she looks like with him.” Again: “Is she cheerful? Is she laughing?” We'll talk a little more of Dmitri's jealousy a bit further down in relation to the narrator's comparison of Dmitri to Othello. 

They are forgiving: “It is hard to imagine what a jealous man can reconcile himself to and overlook, and what he can forgive! The jealous are the readiest of all to forgive.” Forgiveness is no difficult task when they are so disconnected from reality. If situations are never real, they can readily be forgiven because there is nothing to forgive; how easy would it be to forgive a fictional character, knowing that their crimes will never recur or hurt anyone in the real world?
 

Doubt

In my previous posts, I've neglected the significance of chapter divisions within the novel. Though I've been writing about one part at a time (the novel is split into four parts, each of which is split into three books for a total of twelve), I've said little to nothing of how Dusty arranged the books and how they relate to one another.

The indisputable focus of Part III is Dmitri. Wedged into the opening, though, is a seemingly unrelated book, Book VII, about the aftermath of Father Zosima's death. In that Book, there are mentions of two traditions that emerged from the deaths of various holy men. The first is the expectation that a saint's remains have the power to perform healing miracles. Father Paissy, monk and close friend of Zosima's, notes that the townspeople's intense expectation was "displayed with such haste, such openness, even with impatience and almost insistence" that he considered it "an evil temptation," though he himself hoped for the same. The second tradition relates to the "odor of corruption." Saints' bodies allegedly succumbed to putrefaction slower than other bodies, if at all. The notion began when monks seemed to notice that a handful of holy men did not smell after death, and it transformed from anomaly to dogma.

We can read this snowballing of coincidence into inviolable truth as a parallel to the case that mounts against Dmitri. Though we like to believe that courts make few mistakes, the novel's portrayal of events showcase the pitfalls of human fallibility. When Pytor Ilyich goes to the police to tell them that he suspected Dmitri had murdered his father based on circumstantial evidence like blood on his hands, he was beaten to the punch by a woman named Marya Kondratyevna, Fyodor's neighbor, who was alerted by his servants that he was dead: “She [Marya Kondratyevna] arrived only five minutes before Pyotr Ilyich, so that his story came, not as his own surmise and theory, but as the direct confirmation, by a witness, of the theory held by all…” Conjecture and hypothesis play a large role in the accusations against Dmitri.

Speaking of conjecture, before Dmitri's arrest, there are a string of references to mathematics. We've heard a lot about math from Dmitri and from Ivan. Recall that cerebral Ivan finds solace in math: not being able to understand the endeavors of mathematicians is proof for him that he is not meant to understand God, freeing himself from problems of faith and doubt. For Dmitri, however, God besets men with riddles, which appear like two banks of a river, parallel lines which perspectivally meet at infinity. Through mathematics, the complexity of these characters is revealed: Ivan is the "smart" brother, but he is happy to accept math without understanding it; Dmitri, the over-the-top sensualist, struggles with comprehend God's plague of hidden meaning and paradoxical logic.

At any rate, number for yourself the references to math: "At that moment [Dmitri] saw fully, as a mathematical certainty, that this was his last hope." Again, now from Madame Khokhlakova: "This is a case of mathematics: you [Dmitri] couldn't help coming, after all that has passed with Katerina Ivanovna; you couldn't, you couldn't that's a mathematical certainty." Once more: "I'm all for science and realism now... Have you quite made up your mind? Answer mathematically." And finally, from Dmitri: "In all probability, he's alone." We can read this as standing in contrast to and foreshadowing the haphazard nature of the trial, with its circumstantial witnesses and lack of hard evidence. 

Infinite Jest

Dosty loved Shakespeare, and there have been a few references to the bard here and there, but this Part contains four very significant instances (or at least four that I noticed quickly and wrote down).

First of all, there's a discussion about Othello in relation to Dmitri's jealousy. While Dmitri is vile and base and disposed to jealousy, Othello is an honorable man who had to be pushed in order to hide and spy and doubt the faithfulness of Desdemona; the narrator quotes Pushkin: "Othello was not jealous, he was trustful." His soul was shattered when his ideal was destroyed. Moreover, Othello could not be truly jealous, because jealous men "are the readiest of all to forgive." This is derived from their detachment from reality: "If he can somehow be convinced that it has all been 'for the last time,' and that his rival will vanish from that day forward, will depart to the ends of the earth, or that he himself will carry her away somewhere," then he can forgive. Othello, on the other hand, was not truly jealous because he could not think this way; he could not forgive his wife for her imagined faithlessness.

Dmitri himself makes a reference to Shakespeare. In a lovelorn daze, he muses about women, similarly to how Fyodor did earlier: “Woman, I love woman! What is woman? The queen of creation! I am sad, I am sad, Pyotr Ilyich. Do you remember Hamlet? ‘I am so sad, so sad, Horatio… Oh, poor Yorick!’ Perhaps that’s me, Yorick? Yes, I’m Yorick now, and a skull afterwards.” Misquotations aside (I don't think Hamlet ever said, "I am so sad"), we can recall that Yorick was Hamlet's childhood jester ("a fellow of infinite jest"), a fool, whose skull Hamlet finds in the graveyard at the beginning of the final act. 

The next is during a beautiful reconciliation between Dmitri and Grushenka. Grushenka emphasizes that she's a changed woman by asserting that she will become holy: “Do you know, Mitya, I shall go into a nunnery… Tomorrow to the nunnery, but today we’ll dance.” This is another Hamlet reference, when he tells Ophelia to "get thee to a nunnery" during one of his batshit rants. Grushenka is every bit the sensualist that Dmitri is, so the disposition toward convoluted schemes and escapes from reality applies to her as well. 

Finally is Pytor Ilyich, whom Dmitri goes to after brutalizing Grigory. Pytor is shocked to find Dmitri's hands covered in blood and helps him wash it off. This reference, and the whole notion of having "blood on your hands" comes from Macbeth when Lady Macbeth sleepwalks and sleepwashes her hands: "Out, damn'd spot!" Macbeth himself makes a similar comment: "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?" answering: "No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine / Making the green one red." 

The easiest way to connect all these references is as foreshadowing Dmitri's downfall: Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth are Shakespeare's most famous tragedies (I bet we'd find a King Lear reference if we looked hard enough), and in Book VIII, where all of these are contained, Dmitri experiences the greatest joy he has in the entire novel -- winning Grushenka's love -- only to have it immediately torn from him. (Although we must not believe that the arrest is a stumbling block to his joy: he has Grushenka, and that is more than enough for him.)

Stray Observations

• I'm officially further than I was the last time I stopped, which came in the middle of the chapter titled, "The Former and Indisputable One," in which Dmitri meets the Polish soldier who was Grushenka's first love. They -- Dmitri, Grushenka, the officer, and a few others -- drink and play cards in a scene that reminded me a lot of the tavern scene in Inglourious Basterds in that it was multilingual and incredibly boring.
• Rakitin to Alyosha: “So you despise me now for those twenty-five rubles? I’ve sold my friend, you think. But you are not Christ, you know, and I am not Judas.” See “Bob Dylan’s 115^th Dream”: “I said, You know they refused Jesus, too / He said, You’re not him.” And Breaking Bad: “Just because you killed Jesse James don’t make you Jesse James.” 
• Grushenka tells a story about an onion: There was a wicked woman who was cast into a lake of fire when she died. Her guardian angel was distraught and appealed to God, who asked if she had done anything kind in her life. The angel said that she had once given an onion to a beggar-woman, so God tells him to use that onion to pull her out of hell. The angel goes down and lowers the onion, and the woman graciously grabs hold. When the other people being tormented see her being pulled to heaven, they grab her legs to be pulled up as well. She worries that they will add too much weight and kicks them, saying, "I'm to be pulled out, not you. It's my onion, not yours." Upon her saying this, the onion snaps and she falls back into the fire. Grushenka compares herself to the woman, saying she has only done "one onion," a single good deed in her life. We should consider this when thinking about Grushenka, but we should also pay attention to the woman's words: "It's my onion, not yours." 
• Dmitri, likewise, has a story that appears to him in the form of a dream. He sees a line of peasant women, one of whom has a crying baby. He asks why the baby is crying, to which someone responds, "It's a baby." Unsatisfied, he continues to ask why, like a petulant child would, until finally he articulates the question he wants to ask: "'Tell me: why is it those poor mothers stand there, why are people poor, why is the babe poor, why is the steppe barren, why don't they hug each other and kiss, why don't they sing songs of joy, why are they so dark from black misery, why don't they feed the babe?' And he felt that, though his questions were unreasonable and senseless, yet he wanted to ask just that."
• Dmitri: "Though I make up my mind every day, and every day spur myself on to do it, and yet for a whole month I can't bring myself to do it, you see." The feeling always passed.
• Related to this, Alyosha has a powerful, visceral reaction to the odor of corruption leaking from his mentor's corpose. But not a day later, "Joy, joy was glowing in his mind and in his heart." The odor of corruption, which made Alyosha feel awful and humiliated, "no longer made him feel miserable or indignant" even though it had "a few hours before." We would do well to recall Zosima's comment about Job: "It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy." 
• Alyosha gets some nice lines in this section: “Tragic phrases comfort the heart… Without them, sorrow would be too heavy for men to bear.” And later:  “There’s no living without joy,” Mitya says… 'Everything that is true and beautiful is always full of forgiveness.'" (cf. "Ode on a Grecian Urn") As he stares up at the night sky, “the silence of earth seemed to melt into the silence of the heavens," echoing Ovid's conception of universal contiguity.
• What a beautiful contrast to show that Grushenka loves Dmitri: throughout the novel, Dmitri has called himself an insect, a worm, a viper; to Grushenka, though, he is a falcon.  “A falcon flew in and my heart sank. ‘Fool! That’s the man you love!’ That was what my heart whispered to me at once.”