‹ Back

Карамазовы: чем страдает душа каждого из братьев? - Православный журнал «Фома»

🌐 Quote shown in the original Russian — English translation below

… криминальной оболочкой, рассказывает Никита Сюндюков — философ, старший преподаватель РАНХиГС.

«Растроение» личности

Такие герои, как Алеша, Митя и Иван, могли возникнуть только в России второй половины XIX века. Трудно представить себе братьев Карамазовых на европейской или азиатской почве. Но в тоже время характеры Карамазовых универсальны. Через них Достоевский стремится выразить человека как такового.

«Один брат — атеист. Отчаяние. Другой — весь фанатик. Третий — будущее поколение, живая сила, новые люди» — так Федор Михайлович определяет характеры братьев Карамазовых в записных тетрадях к будущему роману.

Человек будущего поколения — Митя. Он воплощает собой нарождающуюся, еще не определенную в полной мере русскую идею. Через образ Мити можно проследить, что такое русский человек, каков его нравственный характер. Русская идея — та самая широта души, которую Митя одновременно прославляет и проклинает.

Neutral · Karamazov brothers
Sentiment: neutral

The speaker is providing a descriptive classification of the three brothers' character archetypes.

🇬🇧 English translation

The Karamazovs: What Does the Soul of Each Brother Suffer From? - Orthodox Magazine 'Foma'

The Karamazovs: What Does the Soul of Each Brother Suffer From?

Three brothers, not counting the murderer: Mitya, Ivan, Alyosha. Three themes, not counting the murder: Russia, evil, salvation. This seemingly private story became a philosophical reflection on the ultimate questions of existence. Nikita Syundyukov—a philosopher and senior lecturer at RANEPA—tells us about Dostoevsky's final novel and the profound plot hidden beneath its criminal shell.

"Fragmentation" of Personality

Characters like Alyosha, Mitya, and Ivan could only have emerged in Russia in the second half of the 19th century. It is hard to imagine the Karamazov brothers on European or Asian soil. But at the same time, the Karamazov characters are universal. Through them, Dostoevsky strives to express humanity as such.

"One brother is an atheist. Despair. Another is a fanatic. The third is the future generation, a living force, new people"—this is how Fyodor Mikhailovich defined the characters of the Karamazov brothers in his notebooks for the future novel.

The man of the future generation is Mitya. He embodies the emerging, not yet fully defined Russian idea. Through the image of Mitya, one can trace what a Russian person is and what their moral character is like. The Russian idea is that very breadth of soul that Mitya simultaneously glorifies and curses.

Ivan expresses one of the key themes of the 19th century—the theme of rebellion against God. Why does God allow evil? Can our unsettled world, drowning in pain and suffering, be justified from the standpoint of reason? Does an honest person have any chance at all to preserve faith in an all-good God—using Ivan Karamazov's metaphor, to "keep the ticket" that contains the justification of Divine creation?

The third brother is Alyosha. His theme is asceticism and salvation. Can a person save themselves by their own strength? How is our salvation structured in general, and what is necessary for it? And where does it take place—in heaven or on earth?

Thus, through the images of the brothers, three universal themes are intertwined in the novel: Russia, evil, and salvation.

But the fates of the brothers are also intertwined in the same way. Neither Ivan, nor Alyosha, nor Mitya can be understood in isolation from one another. They are three sides of a single personality, a single "Karamazov" type. Mitya asks Ivan's questions, Ivan is concerned with Alyosha's fate, and Alyosha seeks the solution to his internal problems in Mitya's torment. Each of the brothers is one facet of Dostoevsky's overarching question that permeates all the writer's work: what does it mean to find the human in the human?

Even as a young man, in a letter to his brother, Dostoevsky formulated his artistic position: "Man is a mystery... I am engaged with this mystery because I want to be human." In other words, to fully become human, one must know the profound nature of humanity, its foundation. What is this foundation? The answer is contained in the very title of the novel: the question of human nature can only be resolved through the recognition of universal brotherhood and the kinship of people. However, a new problem lurks in this answer. The fact is that in every person, the Karamazov principle is embedded—stinking, disgusting little sins that prevent the sought-after feeling of kinship from blossoming. How is this problem revealed in the image of each brother?

Mitya Karamazov

The eldest brother, Mitya Karamazov, is the embodiment of the Russian idea, the Russian national character. When the lawyer and the prosecutor dissect Mitya's personality during the trial, they are essentially presenting a diagnosis of the spiritual and social state of the Russian people:

"And yet, here it is, our Mother Russia, it smells of her, it can be heard—" the prosecutor Ippolit Kirillovich declares pathetically. "Oh, we are immediate; we are evil and good in a most wonderful mixture; we are lovers of enlightenment and Schiller, and at the same time, we rage in taverns and tear the beards off our drunken companions. Oh, and we can be good and beautiful, but only when we ourselves feel good and beautiful. On the contrary, we are even overcome—precisely overcome—by the noblest ideals, but only on the condition that they are achieved by themselves, fall from the sky onto our table, and, most importantly, for free, for free, so that we pay nothing for them."

Mitya himself constantly returns to the Russian theme, swearing love to his poor and unhappy motherland, exclaiming that he could not move to America, that he would waste away there with sadness for Russia, and therefore he hates the country of freedom even before he has arrived there. And Mitya's love, Grushenka is "Russian to the very bone; she will long for her native land."

Perhaps most fully and accurately, Dostoevsky expresses the essence of the Russian character in the essay "Vlas" from "A Writer's Diary." Here he defines our key national trait as follows: it is the forgetting of any measure, a desperate maximalism, a readiness to go beyond any conceivable and inconceivable limits. From this maximalism flows the Russian desire for a grand gesture, a dislike for compromise, a refusal to settle for some middle, relative truth—all those qualities so familiar to us through Dostoevsky's rebellious characters. Russian breadth can turn into both a positive and a negative trait; maximalism gives rise both to a fall into the most disgusting sin, into an abyss of lawlessness, and to a striving for a shining, unconditioned, indisputable truth:

"It is a need to go over the edge, a need for a fading sensation, to reach the abyss, to hang halfway over it, to peer into the very depths and—in private cases, but quite frequent ones—to throw oneself into it headlong like a madman. <...> A certain kindest person may suddenly become a loathsome wretch and a criminal—it only takes him falling into this whirlwind, this fateful cycle of convulsive and momentary self-negation and self-destruction, so characteristic of the Russian national character in certain fateful moments of its life. But with equal strength, with equal speed, with equal thirst for self-preservation and repentance, the Russian person, as well as the whole people, saves himself, and usually, when he reaches the final limit, that is, when there is nowhere left to go."

"The need to go over the edge" is indeed Mitya Karamazov, his entire essence. Mitya is driven by a desire to plunge into the most base, vile position—with the clearest consciousness of this vileness—and yet, within him lives an internal striving for good, goodness, and God. "I am a Karamazov," Mitya says. "Because if I am to fly into the abyss, then I will go straight, headfirst and heels up, and I am even satisfied that I am falling in such a humiliating position and I consider it a beauty for myself. And in this very shame, I suddenly begin a hymn. Let me be cursed, let me be low and vile, but let me also kiss the edge of that robe in which my God is clothed; let me walk at the same time following the devil, but I am still Your son, Lord, and I love You, and I feel the joy without which the world cannot stand and be."

Mitya, like all Russians according to Dostoevsky, is driven by this fateful contradiction: the striving to fall to the very bottom in order to begin praising the Lord from there. Herein lies one of Fyodor Mikhailovich's most cherished ideas. Even in the heart of darkness, the Russian soul preserves a longing for the Lord. A Russian criminal always perceives himself precisely as a criminal, his crime as a sin, rather than an accidental transgression or the result of a bad environment. A Russian sinner keeps in his heart the consciousness of a deep, unforgivable guilt before God.

How can one not recall Marmeladov's speech here about the useless, weak, and drunken ones, who are no less dear to the Lord than those strong in spirit, and whom He will forgive because, through their whole lives, through the stench and sin, they carried love for Him. Mitya continues Marmeladov's line. He is the "drunken" Russian soul wandering through taverns and dens, a sinful soul, but always ready to turn toward salvation (most often, unfortunately, in the final, fateful minutes).

But what allows Mitya to maintain his longing for God and hope in Him even in the lowest fall? It is a frantic, animalistic love for life, which, in turn, is born from the premonition of death.

"Being only begins to be when non-being threatens it," Dostoevsky reflected in his notebook. More than once or twice, the writer gives artistic expression to this thought in different novels, describing the consciousness of a man being led to execution. Dostoevsky repeatedly returns to his own thoughts, which came to him on December 22, 1849, when, as part of the other participants in the "Petrashevsky Circle," he was being led to the scaffold at the Semyonovsky Parade Ground. The understanding that life could end in a few minutes illuminated the writer's consciousness like a flash of lightning, and he spent the rest of his life dealing with the resolution of this fateful riddle of human existence—the inevitability of death. Here is how his search is expressed in "Crime and Punishment":

"Where was it," Raskolnikov thought, walking on, "where did I read that a man condemned to death, an hour before death, says or thinks that if he had to live somewhere at a height, on a rock, and on such a narrow ledge that only two feet could be placed—and all around there would be abysses, an ocean, eternal darkness, eternal solitude, and an eternal storm—and to remain like that, standing on an arshin of space, all his life, a thousand years, eternity—then it would be better to live like that than to die now! Just to live, to live, and to live! No matter how to live—just to live!.. What truth! Lord, what truth! A scoundrel, a man! And a scoundrel is he who calls him a scoundrel for this."

It is precisely as a scoundrel that Mitya Karamazov identifies his passionate love for life. It is not for nothing that he repeatedly characterizes this love as "Karamazovism." Vileness mixed with truth-loving, lowliness mixed with holiness—is it not these traits of the Karamazov nature that Mitya speaks of when he laments the ideal of the Madonna, which in another, more developed heart coexists with the ideal of Sodom? Out of love for life, a person is capable of committing crimes against God's laws—but from this same love, passionate righteousness is born, the adoration of every creature and all of creation as a whole. In this internal conflict of love and vileness is expressed, perhaps, the most essential trait of "Karamazovism," of which the eldest brother Mitya becomes the ideologue.

And where does he come to the realization of this trait? In the prison, that is, on the boundary between being and non-being. Having found himself within dilapidated walls, Mitya realized how passionately he loves life, life as such, life that continues both in freedom and in confinement. "No matter how to live—just to live!" Life is an absolute value; it is the main gift of God to man.

Mitya says to Alyosha: "It seems to me there is so much of this strength in me now that I will overcome everything, all the sufferings, just to say and tell myself every minute: I am! In a thousand agonies—I am; writhing in torture—but I am! I sit in a pillar, but I also exist; I see the sun, or I do not see the sun, but I know that it is there. And to know that the sun is there—that is already all of life."

This is a critically important thought for Dostoevsky: the possession of life itself is happiness. Life can be poor, full of suffering, devoid of room for joy and sun. But the very awareness that this sun is somewhere out there is already a guarantee of immeasurable happiness, for the Lord commands His sun to rise over both the evil and the good (Matt 5:45). A person who has lost this evangelical truth inevitably loses faith in happiness, which, in turn, leads to a rejection of life.

We find the same love for life in Ivan—let us recall his monologue about the "sticky leaves." Ivan notes that even in Alyosha himself, this Karamazov thirst for life resides. And even in Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, we find a passionate thirst for life—of course, a corrupt and perverted thirst, yet one that testifies to the father Karamazov's love for God's creation.

Dostoevsky confirms the identity of love for life and love for God through a reference to Schiller's "Ode to Joy," whose lines Ivan loves to quote:

Kinship of souls! Oh, heavenly beam!

All-sustaining link!

It leads to the heavens,

Where the Unknown soars!

At the breasts of blessed nature

All that breathes drinks Joy!

All creatures, all nations

It draws along;

To us, it gave friends in misfortune—

The juice of the cluster, the wreaths of the Graces,

To insects—sensuality,

To the Angel—to stand before God.

According to Schiller, every creature is allotted its share in being, which, with the proper attitude, reveals the purest source of joy. Insects are granted sensuality, that is, the sensory perception of the world—and this is their way of thanking God, His rational design. Angels are given the highest lot—to stand before Him, and they respond to this with unceasing songs of praise. To man, says Schiller, are given friends, wine, and beauty—and the joy that man receives through participating in them is itself a testament to the greatness and goodness of God.

Quoting Schiller, Mitya echoes Elder Zosima, who says that "every little herb, every little bug, every ant, every golden bee, all of them know their way to the point of astonishment, they testify to God's mystery, they continuously perform it themselves." And only man has forgotten the joy that the Lord granted to all living beings. Moreover, he forgot it consciously, by turning away from God, by refusing His will, by returning to Him that very "ticket."

A man, says the Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola, is a being that stands between the beast and the angel. Schiller says the same. Insects are granted sensuality, the angel is granted standing before God. Man hangs between these two principles, these two abysses. Mitya tirelessly emphasizes that he is that insect, because he knows only sensuality, not standing before God. In self-abasement lies the root of his pain and suffering. Mitya lowers himself to an insect, thereby denying his own human dignity.

And yet Mitya maintains hope for salvation, for a return to the Lord. "We, the underground men, will sing a tragic hymn to God, from whom joy comes! Long live God and His joy! I love Him!" From the underground man, a new man is born—this is how the eldest Karamazov, resurrected in prison, calls himself. Only having found himself in confinement, alone with himself, deprived of earthly, sensory joy, did he realize that the internal, God-given joy of life does not depend on external conditions. Like God, joy lives within man, and like Him, joy cannot be desecrated.

Throughout the entire book, Mitya, voluntarily or involuntarily, strives to confess to Alyosha, to pour out his soul to him, to tell him his whole inner truth. This motive is connected to a sense of inadequacy, of the incompleteness of a person outside of their communion with others. Realizing that his own fate depends on his brother's answer, Mitya asks Alyosha in the final chapters: "Alyosha, tell me the whole truth, as before the Lord God: do you believe that I killed, or do you not believe?" Mitya himself, of course, knows that he is not a murderer. He did not actually commit the murder. But in his thoughts, he truly wanted to kill his father, and only God kept him from parricide. Mitya's soul hangs on that boundary between the animal principle and the angelic principle, and by asking this question, he entrusts his fate to his younger brother. From Alyosha's answer depends how Mitya will define himself in the future: a parricide or simply a stumbling sinner. Alyosha answers as if from the heart: "Not for a single minute did I believe you were a murderer." With this answer, he points to the God-inspired principle within his older brother, recognizing his passionate striving for life and freedom as the thread that connects Mitya to God.

Ivan Karamazov

The complex, somber Ivan seems the complete opposite of the simple and immediate Mitya. Ivan boasts of his own intellect and seems to look down slightly on those around him. He often emphasizes his loneliness, stressing that he needs no one in life.

At the same time, Ivan actually needs Alyosha very much. He constantly drags him either to a tavern or into a private room, just as Mitya wishes to confess to his younger brother, to present his own convictions to his judgment. But why does the intellectual Ivan need the assessment of a simple novice? Ivan is being cunning. According to him, he is driven by brotherly concern; he wants to steer Alyosha away from the monastic path: "You are dear to me, I do not want to lose you and I will not yield you to your Zosima." Of course, we cannot take Ivan at his word.

The fact is that Ivan sees Alyosha's purity. He understands that his younger brother is the only person who will not interpret his words with bias, who is capable of sincerely empathizing with his own torments and pains. It is characteristic that at the end of the novel, Ivan is tormented by the same question as Mitya. Hiding his burning interest and assuming a detached appearance, he asks Alyosha with coldness in his voice: "Who is the murderer, in your opinion?" As usual, Alyosha ignores his brother's arrogance, understanding that here too his answer is of a fateful nature. "It wasn't you who killed the father, not you!" he tirelessly repeats.

Alyosha knows that a struggle is taking place in Ivan's soul, the outcome of which determines his sanity and his fate. With all his strength, he tries to convince his brother that there is not such a critical amount of malice and hatred in his soul that would drive people to murder. Faith in the purity of a neighbor's soul, Alyosha believes, is capable of leading a neighbor to salvation.

In this conversation between the brothers, an interesting property of Ivan's personality is revealed. In essence, Ivan is a man terribly insecure in himself. He cannot decide on any of his decisions, nor on any of his own ideas. He sometimes defends rebellion against God in "The Grand Inquisitor," and on the contrary, in the cell of Elder Zosima, he quite sincerely insists on the necessity of the state's rebirth into the Church. These views contradict each other, but only because Ivan himself cannot decide on his worldview.

(See also the video by Nikita Syundyukov in the Foma Magazine Academy project:)

(Subscribe to not miss new episodes of the Foma Magazine Academy:)

"Likbez" is a unique monopodcast of the Foma Magazine Academy. In each episode, professionals participate: teachers, priests, professors. Our heroes expertly and with soul create a space for deep discussions. Non-obvious meanings of books, film analyses, excursions through paintings, and reviews of cult films and directors: a view at the intersection of culture and religion.

Zosima insightfully points to this indecisiveness of Ivan. And just as in the conversation with Alyosha, Ivan seems to ask the elder, half-seriously and half-jokingly, about the possible outcome of his worldview searches. Will he ultimately find God or not? Zosima answers: "If he cannot decide [the question of faith in God] in the affirmative, he will never decide in the negative, you know this property of your heart; and in this is all its torment. But thank the Creator that He gave you a higher heart, capable of suffering such torment, 'to seek the higher things, the heavenly things, for our life is in the heavens.' May God grant that the decision of your heart reaches you while you are still on earth, and may God bless your ways!"

To repeat, Ivan asks the question about his fate with a slight smile. Ivan often laughs, snarks, and ironizes, making it difficult to understand what he actually thinks—is he sincere or just pretending? But after the elder reveals the key contradiction in Ivan's soul—the painful impossibility of resolving the questions set before him with his own mind alone—Ivan changes. He approaches the elder with a serious expression and asks for his blessing.

Ivan's personality is the embodiment of the struggle between mind and heart. In the Age of Enlightenment, of which our God-fighter is a descendant, the belief formed that all the key questions that have tormented humanity for centuries could be solved by reason alone, by logic alone. All that needs to be done is to clarify one's mind, to shed light on the foundations of our consciousness. Ivan bases his reflections on this very premise. He wants to comprehend the world based solely on the power of his own intellect. He asks the world flawlessly logical questions, but either receives no answer or is not satisfied with the answers he receives.

In the scene with the devil, the tempter recalls several of Ivan's works: besides "The Poem of the Grand Inquisitor," Ivan wrote a story about an atheist who, after traveling a quadrillion kilometers on the way to the Kingdom of Heaven, finally finds paradise bliss that redeems all his tribulations. But at the same time, Ivan is the author of a certain "Tale of Geological Layers," which describes the future of humanity liberated from the idea of God. According to this tale, only then will people find true happiness.

In essence, Ivan strives for a religious idea: the universal happiness of people. All his torments and all his reflections boil down to this dream. Alyosha notes that "The Poem of the Grand Inquisitor" is not a blasphemy against God, as Ivan intended it, but a praise to Him. Perhaps it is precisely this praise that Ivan truly desires, that he strives for, like the creatures in Schiller's poem, but is not yet ready to fully admit this striving to himself and therefore clothes it in rebellion against God.

In both the concept of "The Grand Inquisitor" and the problems Ivan poses to humanity, there is a secret longing for universal happiness and salvation; a longing due to human suffering and the impossibility of enduring that suffering.

However, let us note one point. In the novel, not only Ivan but also Elder Zosima speaks of the terrible suffering of children, who should not exist in this world. Zosima exhorts the monks that they must put all their strength into ensuring that there are no more children's sufferings, that no child's tear is shed. Ivan, however, uses children's suffering merely as a speculative argument in favor of his rebellion against God. The children themselves do not interest him, unlike his brother Alyosha, who devotes much time to communicating with children.

A similar problem is posed but resolved differently. Ivan desires to reorganize humanity by depriving it of one of its main divine gifts—freedom. Elder Zosima, and later Mitya, also recognize the suffering of humanity, but their conclusions differ from Ivan's: what is necessary is not a collective, but an individual, personal transformation, a change of mind. Mitya, summarizing his spiritual search, discovers a new person within himself and, following this, repeats Elder Zosima's key thesis: everyone is guilty for everyone.

However, Ivan finds this thought beyond his power, for as an individualist, he is not ready to recognize his involvement in the universal guilt, not ready to see the original sin within his own soul, whose nature is as much collective as it is individual.

Moreover, Ivan's beautiful and coherent theories do not go beyond reflections. Ivan himself does not follow his rebellious maxim "everything is permitted"—its implementation is left to Smerdyakov, his half-brother, pupil, and ideological double. When Ivan sees the specific practical results his theory leads to, he is horrified. He realizes that the spiritual liberation he preached is by no means as beautiful, majestic, and sublime as it appeared in his creative dreams in "The Poem of the Grand Inquisitor." The dry residue of Ivan's theory is always Smerdyakov.

Ivan's weakness and indecisiveness are felt by the devil—and it is not accidental that he appears in the guise of a vulgar man. The devil is poorly dressed, tells bad jokes, and falls short of the high image of an intellectual that Ivan himself drew for himself. The devil is like a parody of Ivan, one that Ivan would never want to see in himself. He is not ready to admit that the devil is not just his worst part, but the complete embodiment of his way of thinking. The devil catches the internal contradiction of the middle Karamazov brother, noted earlier by Zosima: his love for theoretical play, his inability or unwillingness to follow his thought to the end, his uncertainty on all key questions. In fact, Ivan cannot say anything definitive about the transformation of man, about suffering, or about the existence of God. He is, in the words of the apostle, "neither cold nor hot"; he prefers to exist above those "yes" and "no"es of which the Savior spoke, thereby remaining on the side of the evil one.

The devil plays with Ivan. Ivan asks the devil a question that his father once asked him: "Is there a God or not? — again with fierce persistence Ivan shouted." The middle Karamazov is unexpectedly serious and demands an equally serious answer, for the question of God's existence is not definitively resolved in his heart. It continues to trouble Ivan, although the hero is portrayed as an atheist who is ready to return his ticket to God. The devil answers: "Ah, so you're serious? My dear fellow, by God, I don't know, you've said a great word.

— You don't know, but do you see God? No, you are not on your own, you are me, you are me and nothing more! You are trash, you are my fantasy!"

Thus, Ivan himself admits that he does not fully know if God exists. And yet, the decision to those very questions that torment him—about children's suffering, about the ways to overcome this suffering, about whether everything is permitted—depends on the answer to this question. The devil continues: "Je pense donc je suis (I think, therefore I am), that I know for certain, but everything else around me, all these

‹ Back