Dostoevsky`S “Brothers Karamazov” And “Crime And Punishment” Essay, Research Paper
In Dostoevsky’s novels pain and some heavy burden of the inevitability of
human suffering and helplessness form Russia. And he depicts it not with
white gloves on, nor through the blisters of the peasant, but through people
who are close to him and his realities: city people who either have faith,
or secular humanists who are so remote from reality that even when they love
humanity they despise humans because of their own inability to achieve or to
create paradise on earth. His novels The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and
Punishment are best examples of the poisonous effect of such ideals on the
common human. The rebellion of these humanists against the system and the
reality of human life becomes more important, thus love becomes the filter
and the servant of pride and ideals. The cause of XIX c. liberals becomes
more important to them than the actual human being that might not fit the
picture of their perfect and humane society. Through these problems and
opposites which cross and overlap each other, Dostoevsky depicts social
issues, especially the problem of murder, through an image of people who go
through pain. He presents a graphical experience of ones who do not know how
to deal with humanity and its problems. Dostoevsky himself does not give a
clear solution nor does he leave one with the certainty of faith for an
example. He says himself:
Finding myself lost in the solution of these questions, I decide
to bypass them with no solution at all. (From the Author. The
Brothers Karamazov)
Through the presentation of crime and the issue of money which is often
connected to it, Dostoevsky retells a Bible story. His answer to the problem
of evil and human life filled with suffering, at least the most persuading
one, for a better society and better social conditions is active love. That
is not the love that is directed towards the humanity as a whole, but
towards the individual: “Strive to love your neighbor actively and
indefatigably” (II, 4). For Dostoevsky such love is a false one and he
presents it through such characters as Rakitin, Perkhotin and even Luzhin:
Consciousness of life is superior to life, knowledge of the laws
of happiness is superior to happiness–that is what we must fight
against. (The Dream of a Ridiculous Man , p. 382)
One of greatest evils for Dostoevsky are the so-called liberals who “love
humanity more than an individual man.” Yet he does not represent their
behavior as genuinely evil . Their hate towards humanity arises exactly from
the opposite: love. Secular humanists see so much evil, crime and
inhumanity, they cannot stop it so they rebel. Ivan Karamazov and his
rebellion are purely of that kind. He is not vile, he just cannot understand
that there might be a solution for such suffering, especially in the case of
children who are innocent in Christianity. That is why Ivan asks:
Love life more than the meaning of it? (II, 3)
Ivan as any average intellectual, wants to know. To know the meaning of life
for him is more important than to actually do something about the human
suffering. Ivan forgets that one human life is as important as the entire
humanity. For him humanity is merely an abstraction which happen to be
surrounding him. He thinks that by knowing and logically, rationally finally
understanding the mystery of life problems would be solved. For Alyosha, the
only answer is love for life, regardless of the meaning and the logic behind
it. To help people and try to forgive them if they do wrong or help them if
they need help is all that Alyosha wants. Faith in God and people is the
only way to live with love. To believe in God and to have trust in human
nature and destiny means to forgive and to repent. It means not hurting
others. Ivan gets trapped by the power of his own intellect and his own
pride: the pride that pulses in humans who want to know more. Ivan
contradicts himself with his rebellion. On one side, everything is
permitted, because there is no God (Ivan is an atheist), on the other the
rule of despotic Inquisitors who claim that there is God, but “know” the
truth: that there is no God. Ivan desires rebellion against the Father and
his father, the proclamation of a man-god, but in the same time Ivan looks
at people like himself as fathers to the masses. Raskolnikov does the same.
He separates people on ordinary and extraordinary. His superman is permitted
everything :
I simply intimate that the “extraordinary” man has the right… I
don’t mean a formal, official right, but he has the right in
himself, to permit his conscience to overstep…(Crime and
Punishment. III, 5)
Ivan praises the idea of God, “which entered the head of such a savage,
vicious beast as man” (Brothers Karamazov, V, 4). So he also thinks most of
people unworthy. How can a man that despises humanity love it at the same
time? If humans are like that than who has a right to be a Superman or the
Inquisitor. Yes, it is true that there are bad humans, but one cannot go and
hate all of human race for the fault of some. Without love the salvation and
better society are impossible. Sonya and her sacrifice for others and her
forgiveness are the best example. She has God because she knows that she is
as big of a sinner and no better than others, and she still loves people,
she does not want to be better for the purpose of egotistical pride.
In Russia at the time the Church was second place and the values of Western
European liberal thought were sweeping through. What Dostoevsky saw was that
none of those ideas actually improved the status of the masses. Thus, the
answer has to lie somewhere else rather than in the assertion of humanists
and rationalists that men are gods. What Raskolnikov does is exactly that:
he gives himself the license to transgress and to decide to be a god. He
rebels against society and its norms. Raskolnikov hates Luzhin and
Svidrigaylov, but by killing the old lady and Lizaveta on his way to his own
purpose he turns into people as evil as the ones he despises most. Once he
crosses the line he does not know where to stop. Geoffrey Kabat writes:
On another, symbolic level, the murder is an attempt to annihilate
a symbol of the oppressive forces of a society in which money
gives one power over other people’s lives and in which lack of
money means dependence on others. (V, 124)
The problem of money and its oppressive and evil character is an important
issue in Dostoevsky’s novels. Raskolnikov is originally troubled because of
his financial problems, Sonya is a prostitute to provide for her family,
Mitya wants to kill his father for money. Judas betrays Jesus for money.
This theme is repeated in Dostoevsky, but there is always something more: in
the end the money (as in the case of Rodion or Mitya) is of lesser
importance than the actual rebellion against the society and the attempt to
change the social conditions which are almost unbearable. They both consider
committing suicide, but do not do it because they are lucky enough to meet
and to follow a Christ figure. Christ would have forgiven Judas, but Judas
did not ask for forgiveness. He felt guilt, but the feeling of guilt is a
necessity if one knows of guilt and possesses fear. To know the guilt is not
enough: to repent is crucial. Grushenka and Sonya forgive because they have
to forgive, but in the first place they know that the guilty have to forgive
themselves and take the path of repentance. Otherwise, rationality at its
best turns a man into a tyrant, on a smaller scale than the Inquisitor, but
still a tyrant. This ego and child rebellion (against every father possible)
of Rodion kill Alyona and Lizaveta and that is why he hurts his mother and
sister. Joseph Frank writes:
By this time, Raskolnikov has begun to understand how easily a prideful
egoism can begin with love and turn into hate. ( Dostoevsky: The Years of
Ordeal 1850-1859.I, 7)
The alternative to the behavior of Svidrigaylov and Raskolnikov in the Crime
and Punishment is Sonya or Sofia. Her name implies that Dostoevsky even
through this wants to show how foolish the Greco-Roman foundation for the
Western thought is. The only person that possesses the ultimate wisdom and
the key to happiness is Sonya. The woman of Russia who believes and takes an
the role of the mother for her sisters and brothers as well as for Rodion
.She loves actively–with her body she sacrifices herself for her family.
Sofia is the one with the answer:
Go at once, this instant, stand at the cross-roads, first bow down
and kiss the earth you have desecrated, then bow to the whole
world, to the four corners of the earth, and say aloud to all the
world: “I have done murder.” (V, 4)
Raskolnikov will not go because for him authority is another representation
of amorality, no better than himself. They do not care about his soul or his
remorse. They want to find the murderer and punish him. The point that
follows out of is that no judicial system is enough to make one truly feel
sorry. The issue of punishment is not what matters. Surely Sonya does not
want Raskolnikov to turn himself in because she hates him or because she
thinks that he is a vile and evil creature. She wants to save him and she
knows that the first path to the savior is the admittance of one’s own sin,
and desire already exists. Sonya knows that Rodion will not be saved if he
is merely sent to Siberia. She follows him with the offer and the example of
her Christian love, fulfilling her words and actively loving, hoping that
his transgression will not push him away from the world back into his own
interior world in which nobody else has a place. Opposite to Sonya is what
“humanists” do, what the “extraordinary” men do. Their idea becomes more
than the actual humanity, more than the actual substance of that idea. The
inevitability of human suffering becomes obvious if one is searching for an
answer. Thus just like Raskolnikov and Ivan rejection of such society and
life comes, which leads to the “cold and inhumanely callous to the point of
inhumanity” (Crime and Punishment, V, 2).
In order to defeat evil one has to start with the assumption that there is
goodness . To rebel violently because of a child’s death only brings greater
evil. Ivan does not love others nor does he love himself. He does not accept
the most important of all, and what is crucial to Sonya and Alyosha:
forgiveness. He cannot forgive himself, for he is accusing himself of
Fyodor’s death, and he goes mad. The Grand Inquisitor and Ivan come very
close together in their hate towards humanity. They hold the opinion that
Christ made a mistake when he sacrificed for the human race. What they do
not understand is that Christ, with his kiss, again and again dies and
sacrifices hims
possibility of goodness, even though there is evil. He forgives. Sonya
forgives, she expresses wisdom with her actions. In The Brothers Karamazov ,
and Crime and Punishment , active love is the highest value and the only
remedy to all of humanity’s problems! Sonya’s hand movements, Zosima’s bow,
Christ’s kiss are a definite and the ultimate answer that Dostoevsky has to
offer to the people. Father Zosima makes this idea very clear:
If you are penitent you love. And if you love you are a God. All
things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. If I, a
sinner, even as you are, am tender with you and have pity on you,
how much more will God. Love is such a priceless treasure that you
can redeem the whole world by it, and expiate not only your own
sins but the sins of others. (Brothers Karamazov. II, 4)
From the story “Akulka’s Husband ,” in which there is everything but regret
on the side of the killer, faith in God is the only path to sanity.
Dostoevsky was a young man when he heard these stories. How could he live
otherwise, if he really actively loved people, but take the belief in God as
a necessity? The belief that the idea of God should be there because
otherwise everything would be allowed is Ivan’s perspective. His claim that
society should be based on the Christian dogma, and that crime should not be
only against the state, but also against Christ, is exactly the opposite of
what to believe and to really love Christ means. Christ did not set out to
punish the transgressors, but he gave them all the love that he could give:
forgiveness and love:
Remember particularly that you cannot be a judge of anyone. For no
one can judge a criminal, until he recognizes that he is just such
a criminal as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is
morethan all man to blame for that crime. (Brothers Karamazov. VI,
3)
For Ivan, eternal justice does not exist, and he also does not believe that
there are guilty. But after that he accuses people of being evil and he does
not forgive them. So he needs a lie to cover the fact of the human
mortality. The only problem is that God is not a lie, at least not for
Dostoevsky. Ivan would establish the rule of the Inquisitor: he would
establish a system that uses Christ for its own survival. To actively love
means to believe and not to calculate or believe only nine hours a day or
when it is helpful to one’s survival
Through the act of rebellion against the social norms and the Christian
dogma secular liberals, or humanists, forget about fellow human beings as
being fallible as much in thought as in action. In those moments, great
defenders of liberal thought and love for humanity forget that they might
not have the definite answer, thus they fall into the same trap as their
predecessors who thought that they knew what is the best for people and
enforced their ideas. They all become Grand Inquisitors and “living gods.”
They all want to spare humans from the burden of their own selves, “for only
we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy.” They preach lies instead of
the truth, thus they develop a different kind of love: tyrannical love. The
Christian love has to be free. This is where the social issue of murder, as
in the case of Akulka’s husband comes in. He obviously does not feel remorse
because he owes something to the government or the system, or to his wife:
Forgive me, I’ll wash your feet now and drink the water too.” (Akulka’s
Husband)
He feels no remorse for the murder and the maltreatment of the woman. The
authority did send him to prison, but what he feels is nothing else but the
feeling of being punished. There is no remorse and seems that there is no
forgiveness. Maybe that is why Dostoevsky does not dwell on his imprisonment
too much. He does not want his own punishment to turn into pride: then
society does not gain anything from the punishment of the one who
transgressed, but plain assertion of its own power. This lapurlative
ideology, system for the sake of itself, does not bring the solution. There
has to be remorse and real acknowledgment and confession. Not confession for
the sake of mere forgiveness, nor that same sentence, “I cannot forgive
myself. ” For Dostoevsky, that is merely an excuse for pride and self-pity.
People find refuge in their theories or in other external factors, such as
being deprived from something by birth, forgetting that the quality of life
is one’s own choice, “don’t do to others. ” In a secular society every class
feels responsible only to its own “natural” or rather accidental
surrounding:
The convict is almost always disposed to feel himself justified in
crimes against authority, so much so that no question about it
ever arises for him. Nevertheless, in practice he is aware that
the authorities take a very different view of his crime and that
therefore he must be punished, and then they are quits. (Ideology
and Imagination. IV, 147)
Dostoevsky’s solution lies in exactly the opposite from the class struggle
and the solution that it brings. All of those strives bring only shifts and
turns but are still based on hate and not on love. When one thinks of God it
is not in terms of class one belongs to, or sex or age. One either accepts
the Word or one does not, one either believes that even the sparrow has its
place in God’s mercy or one goes around raving against God, simultaneously
talking of his necessity. Dostoevsky shows such attitude, such part time
rationalizing as worthless and very often dangerous: suicides and murders.
He truly despises it and mercilessly attacks those sins with all his
strength and his ambiguous words. Zosima’s gives an account of what being
without Christ can do:
They, following science, want to base justice on reason alone, but
not with Christ, as before, and they have already proclaimed that
there is no crime, that there is no sin. And that’s consistent,
for if you have no God what is the meaning of crime? ( Brothers
Karamazov. VI, 3)
This is the danger of Raskolnikov and Ivan’s logic. The society around them
and around Dostoevsky is one which makes children suffer and turns young,
beautiful and wise creatures, like Sonya, into prostitutes. What is the
answer? Is one answer possible to it at all? Can one go on living with the
thought of how much suffering there is ? Does one rebel against the society,
then try to establish a new one, forgetting that society does not come to be
of itself, but is built by human beings: beings imperfect and ready to hurt
and rebel against their fathers, against the idea of “old,” or the society
of the past and present. If that is taken into account the only people who
do make sense out of human existence, which is best showed and expressed
through suffering, are people such as Ilyushka and Sonya. Their argument is
much stronger. They are better for the cause of the improvement of social
issues than the actual orators for the masses. Why? They offer the solution
for peace in one’s soul. They offer it with faith in God, not the rational
path of the Western thinker or with the denial of a Russian nihilist, but
with a leap of faith that charms one against actual, brutal, world. The
tyrants, the intellectuals, the Ivans cannot be prevented, but faith can
defeat them, over and over again. The bow and the kiss have to exist.
Children die, children suffer, society is unjust, people kill for stupid
reasons and base, vile feelings. In a world that is hopelessly destined to
go on like that, faith, God, are the best answers to our despair.
Intellectualism obviously does not bring much advantage or peace–faith and
love do. With God one’s pride can be defeated, one’s responsibility
recognized, one’s active love awakened, one’s soul saved:
By the experience of active love. Strive to love your neighbor
actively and indefatigably. Insofar as you advance in love you
will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of
your soul. If you attain to perfect self-forgetfulness in the love
of your neighbor, then you will believe without doubt, and no
doubt can possibly enter your soul. (Brothers Karamazov. II, 4))
Ivan recognizes that same necessity and usefulness of God. However, he does
not really believe in God, thus he cannot forgive, he cannot forgive
himself, and most importantly he does not believe in the immortality of the
soul and in justice. He does not love. Without a belief in the existence of
justice crime has no meaning. His idea of God is worthless because he is an
atheist, he does not believe. The only way out is not through the lie, with
which the Church for centuries managed its affairs, but through true and
honest belief that things have a purpose and that it does matter to be good
and not to hurt others. One cannot solve society’s problems unless one truly
believes that what is done has a purpose. That is not the way because when
one starts looking at humanity as a whole one will not find many good things
and one will never have any happiness. Only by looking at the individual can
one acquire a moment of happiness and exaltation of the soul, such as
Alyosha’s experiences in the field. Faith is not rational path, but it
equips one with love. Only by having certain values and love for others can
the family as the basic unit of the society survive. Family Karamazov is
certainly a vicious example of what the society may come to if society does
not hold values which produce love: we are all responsible for each other
and we have to forgive each other.
To improve the society and social conditions and to free people from evil on
Earth is impossible. The belief that there is immortality of the soul and
that there is God who takes care of humans is necessary. Dostoevsky goes
further than Voltaire. He believes that you have to have true faith in order
to attain happiness and to create the ground for better life. Intellectual
discussion and the acknowledgment of the necessity for the God as an idea or
a Prime Mover becomes worthless the moment it is meant as a lie. It has to
be the Truth, there has to be faith. If one lives a lie his bitterness that
the dream and the ideal are impossible will only lead to madness, hate, and
ultimately suicide or murder. One has to give active love.
So the ultimate answer to the suffering and the injustice in the world is
love. What higher feeling and more positive there is in human existence?
Again there is no rational way to explain and to really lead one on that
path of faith. The possibility of such belief is real because humans are
able to love. That means that they must be able to suffer for others, they
also must be able to forgive. “Love all men, love everything” are Zosima’s
words. Dostoevsky cannot go further than that.
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