Dostoevsky (165 page)

This Schillerian ambiance is indicated in the notes only by a laconic sentence, “Karl Moor, Franz Moor, Regierender Graf von Moor” (15: 209). These words link the novel with Schiller’s sensational first play,
The Robbers
, whose importance for Dostoevsky’s novel is highlighted by a mocking sally of the old Karamazov. “That is my son,” he says of Ivan, “flesh of my flesh, and most beloved of my flesh! He is my most respectful Karl Moor, so to say, while this one who has just come in, Dimitry Feodorovich, against whom I am seeking justice from you [Zosima], is the unrespectful Franz Moor—they are both out of Schiller’s
The Robbers
, and so I am Regierender Graf von Moor. Judge us and save us!” (14: 66).

The ironic distortions contained in this speech illustrate the manner in which Dostoevsky plays his own variations on Schillerian themes. No one could be less like the tenderhearted, weak-willed, and abused Graf von Moor than the cynical, domineering, and rapacious Feodor Pavlovich, but they are structurally related as fathers involved in contentions with their sons. Karl Moor revolts against both the legal and the moral order because he believes (falsely) that his father denied him love and forgiveness; and although he resembles Ivan thematically because of his revolt against God’s universe on behalf of a suffering humankind, his fiery, explosive temperament brings him much closer to Dimitry as a character type. The cold-blooded intellectual Ivan, unable to love humanity except in the abstract and from a distance, is similar to Franz Moor, Schiller’s Machiavellian villain, whose rationalism causes him to doubt God and immortality and ruthlessly to order the murder of his father.

Not only does
The Robbers
depict the tragedy of a family split by deadly rivalry between father and sons, as well as between the sons themselves (Karl and Franz Moor both desire Amalia, just as Dimitry and Ivan are rivals for Katerina Ivanovna), it also poses the theme of parricide in even more lurid terms. For Schiller as for Dostoevsky, the sacredness of family ties and family feeling is the temporal reflection of the eternal moral order of the universe. It models God’s relation to his creation, and since the negation of the first involves the destruction of the second, it is the atheist and blasphemer Franz Moor who pours scorn on the belief that family ties create mutual obligations of love. “I’ve heard so
much chatter about a so-called love based on blood ties that it’s enough to make the head spin . . . But even more—it is your father! He gave you life, you are his flesh, his blood—so for you he must be holy!”
²⁶

Franz’s rationalism, like that of Ivan, dissolves these primordial ties and obligations of family love in words that are echoed in the trial scene: “I must ask you, why did he create me? Surely not out of love for me, who first had to become an I?”
²⁷
The remainder of this speech, and a later one along the same lines, are transposed by the defense attorney Fetyukovich into the argument that “such a father as the old Karamazov cannot be called a father and does not merit the name. Filial love for an unworthy father is an absurd and impossible thing.” An unworthy father impels his son to ask the questions: “Did he really love me when he begat me? Did he beget me for my sake? He did not know me . . . at the moment of passion, perhaps intensified by wine” (15: 171).

If
The Robbers
shows the morally disintegrating effects of such rationalism on the instinctive moral roots of human life, it also reveals, like
The Brothers Karamazov
, the strength of these roots in the human spirit and the inevitability of their triumph or revenge. Franz Moor’s cynicism, at the last, gives way to a frenzied fear of eternal damnation for his manifold crimes; and he dies in a fit of terror, pleading for a prayer from his old servant. Karl Moor, appalled by the disastrously inhuman consequences of his revolt against the social iniquities of his time—a revolt that only unleashes the worst passions among his robber band, and includes the murder of a child—finally surrenders voluntarily as a sacrifice to the eternal moral order whose avenging instrument he had wished to become. Ivan, too, is appalled by the consequences of his own intellectual revolt as he sees his ideas put into practice by Smerdyakov, and, like Franz Moor, he is tormented by the impossibility of resolving the inner conflict between his skeptical rationalism and the religious faith supporting a moral order. Dimitry follows Karl Moor in being led through suffering to a sense of pity and compassion for others and an acceptance of the technical injustice of his conviction as a sacrifice for the temptation of parricide that he had willingly harbored in his breast.

Many references to Schiller’s poetry are scattered throughout
The Brothers Karamazov
as well, and used to deepen its thematic range. A cosmic and historical-philosophical dimension is provided for Dimitry’s inner conflict between the ideal of the Madonna and that of Sodom by fragments of Schiller’s “Das eleusische Fest” (“The Eleusinian Feast”) and the famous “An die Freude” (“To Joy”). Less overtly, Ivan’s rebellion also moves within the orbit of the Schillerian lyric. When he hands back his “entrance ticket” to the promise of an ultimate eternal harmony of God’s world because the price to be paid for it is too high in human
suffering, Ivan repeats the gesture and uses the same terms as the protagonist of Schiller’s poem “Resignation”:

Of even greater importance are the two lines from Schiller’s “Sehnsucht” (“Longing”), which, placed at the beginning of his Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, condense an important aspect of the religious theme. The Russian version, by the poet V. A. Zhukovsky, is a free translation of Schiller that fits more closely into Dostoevsky’s context than does the original. The literal sense of the Russian is

Dostoevsky’s notes also contain additional traces of his reading, and two other works have plausibly been linked with
The Brothers Karamazov
. Both are by George Sand, another writer whom Dostoevsky had adored in his youth and recently recalled in the
Diary of a Writer
. The research of V. L. Komarovich has brought out convincing resemblances between George Sand’s novel
Mauprat
(1837) and the plot action of
The Brothers Karamazov
. Both novels contain a crucial scene in which a young woman is on the point of being forced to sacrifice her honor, but at the last moment her presumptive ravisher renounces his villainous intentions, and this leads to an emotional entanglement between them in the future. In both, the young man is falsely accused of a murder, and tried and convicted on what seems unimpeachable circumstantial evidence. Sand’s heroine, Edmée, like Katerina Ivanovna, reverses her testimony—but to exonerate rather than condemn. The surprise introduction of a letter written by the accused to the heroine, and prefiguring the crime, also plays a major role in the condemnation. A comparison of parallel passages from the trial scenes makes clear that some of the plot elements of
Mauprat
had left ineradicable traces in Dostoevsky’s memory.
²⁹

Another work of George Sand’s, her unprecedented religious-philosophical novel
Spiridion
(1839), foreshadows
The Brothers Karamazov
on a deeper thematic level.
Spiridion
takes place entirely in a monastery and consists largely of
conversations between a dying monk, Alexis—the inheritor of a semiheretical religious tradition handed down to him by his dead mentor, Spiridion—and a young novice named Angel. Alyosha Karamazov is also constantly called “angel,” and his adoring relation to Father Zosima is similar to that of Sand’s young disciple to
his
saintly teacher, also regarded with great suspicion by monks of a more orthodox persuasion. Like Zosima, Alexis is on the point of death; and he conveys his dying words to Angel, whom he calls “the son of my intelligence,” exactly as Zosima confides the story of his life and his teachings to Alyosha, whom he considers the reincarnation of his brother Markel. Of course, Dostoevsky had long nourished the project of writing a work set in a monastery, and it could well be that
Spiridion
, which he had read on publication, encouraged such an intention at the very outset of his literary career.
³⁰

At the novel’s climax the monastery is invaded by the armies of the French Revolution. Alexis is put to death, but he forgives the rampaging soldiers in his last words because he sees them acting “in the name of the
sansculotte
Jesus,” on whose behalf “they are desecrating the sanctuary of the Church.” Jesus was thus for him a revolutionary figure, a
sansculotte
, whose ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity were being fulfilled in practice, though entirely unconsciously, by the marauding soldiers.
³¹
Here we have the Utopian Socialist Christ of Dostoevsky’s own early manhood—the semisecularized Christ whose social ideals he had never renounced but whose aims, particularly in Russia, he had long ceased to believe could be attained through revolutionary violence.

On opening the tomb of Spiridion after Alexis’s death, Angel finds buried with him the Gospel of Saint John (Dostoevsky’s own favorite, from which he took the epigraph for
The Brothers Karamazov
), Jean de Parme’s
Introduction to the Eternal Gospel
(a book written by a disciple of Joachim di Fiori, denounced as a heretic and burned in 1260), and Spiridion’s own commentary on this latter text. He had interpreted it as a prophecy predicting the arrival of the reign of the Holy Ghost—the reign of the principles represented by the French soldiers, who were thus accomplishing God’s will. His spiritual guide passes on this doctrine to Angel, who will take it into the world—just as Father Zosima passes on
his
teachings to Alyosha. Both mentors hold out the equally messianic hope (if only, for Zosima, at the end of time!) of a total transformation of earthly life into a realm of Christian felicity.

Aside from such similarities, it is impossible to read
Spiridion
without being struck by the concordance between some of Alexis’s utterances and Dostoevsky’s own most cherished convictions. No theme was more important for him in the
1870s than that of the first temptation of Christ, the turning of stones into bread. To yield to this temptation could only result in the surrender by humankind of its freedom of conscience; and Sand expressed the same thought forty years earlier. “This gigantic task of the French Revolution was not, it could not be,” Alexis declares, “only a question of bread and shelter for the poor; it was something much loftier. . . . [I]t had to, it still must . . . fully accomplish the task of giving freedom of conscience to the entire human race. This soul that torments me, this thirst for the infinite which devours me, will they be satisfied and appeased because the body is safe from want?”
³²

Nor was anything of greater moment for Dostoevsky than to emphasize the supreme significance for human life of the prospect of eternity, and to combat the atheistic confinement of existence to the limits of life on earth. Here too we find Alexis eloquently expressing the same longing, the same innate human need to transcend terrestrial boundaries. “And . . . when all the duties of men among themselves are established through a system of mutual interest, will this suffice for human happiness? . . . No matter how peaceful, how sweet one supposes life on earth to be, will it suffice for the desires of mankind and will the world be vast enough to encompass human thought?” Alexis also proclaims one of Zosima’s most sublime moral principles: the universal responsibility of each for all.
³³
One can well understand why Dostoevsky felt no hesitation in stretching the literal, historical truth when, in his obituary of her in the
Diary
, he spoke of George Sand as “one of the most perfect confessors of Christ.”