Expressions such as ‘as if, ‘almost’, ‘some sort of, qualify the description and it is ‘someone’, not specifically ‘God’, who visits his soul. Perhaps to the modern mind, however, this bashfulness about the Christian God is less important than the affirmation of the value of religious experience itself. There is no doubt that Dostoevsky wanted at all costs to escape dry conventionality in the presentation of his answer to Ivan, and to represent religious faith as a synthesis of unique personal experience with the authority of the Scriptures. What he has undoubtedly succeeded in doing is demonstrating a wide variety of religious experience, much of it false (Ivan, Ferapont, Fyodor Karamazov), some of it bearing fruit in richer lives (Zosima, Markel, Alyosha).
As always, ideas are intimately linked with personal feelings in Dostoevsky and the reader is invited to judge the validity of the ideas by the viability of the personality. In that case, Alyosha’s spiritual destiny, being more enviable than Ivan’s, might incline us in his favour. The Russian scholar Valentina Vetlovskaia has shown, moreover, that Dostoevsky uses various subtle rhetorical devices to predispose us towards Zosima and Alyosha, and against Ivan and characters such as Miusov and Rakitin. Indeed, Zosima’s and Alyosha’s voices are never presented ironically, whereas the reverse is true to varying degrees of all the other characters.
This runs against what many readers, following the influential Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, have seen as the principal distinguishing feature of Dostoevsky’s major novels, and The Brothers Karamazov in particular. Bakhtin called the Dostoevskian novel ‘polyphonic’. One of the things he meant by this is that each voice in the book has equal weight in an ongoing dialogue, including the author’s. Nowadays we should be more inclined to say ‘including the narrator’s’ in order not to confuse the voice of Dostoevsky’s narrator (itself a fictional construct) with his own. Bakhtin argues that this constitutes a major revolution in the history of the novel. Most other novels are ‘monologic’ in the sense that the voices of the characters are evidently subordinated to a single consciousness which we usually identify with that of the author. As a matter of fact (as Terras explains), Dostoevsky’s narrator himself exhibits here two fundamentally incompatible voices: a local resident who is realistic and sceptical, and an omniscient narrator who is an idealist and a believer, and who knows things about the characters’ thoughts which the resident could not possibly know. The reader may notice that in the former mode the narrator displays all sorts of stylistic awkwardness. Although the permissible limits of stylistic awkwardness are not the same in English as in Russian, the translators of this much-acclaimed English version have endeavoured to retain his idiosyncratic prose, thereby preserving much of the humour and distinctive voicing of the novel.
There has of course been much dispute about Bakhtin’s thesis, but it has proved a very powerful tool when applied to Dostoevsky’s major novels. They do privilege free dialogue in a more radical way than we find in any of Dostoevsky’s predecessors or contemporaries. One thing about which there is no doubt is that each of the major characters has a distinct and distinctive personality and with it an individual voice of his or her own. Although it is claimed that each of the brothers has something of the Karamazov inheritance, they are so different from each other that some critics have been tempted to see in them three basic human types, roughly defined as the sensual (Dmitri), the spiritual (Alyosha) and the intellectual (Ivan).
It is true that Dmitri seems to have inherited sensuality from his father, but he has none of his father’s low meanness. On the contrary, Dmitri is notable for his idealism, his sense of honour and his wrestling with the idea of two kinds of beauty — the beauty of Sodom and the beauty of the Madonna. He complains that people are so complex that a thirst for both types of beauty can coexist within them.
In spite of his own misgivings, Alyosha appears to have very little of his father’s sensuality and what he has seems, as the critic Frank Seeley argues, to have been sublimated: ‘Alyosha is predominantly his mother’s son.’ To the reader of Dostoevsky’s earlier novels he follows in that tradition of ‘saintly’ characters which include Sonya Marmeladova (Crime and Punishment), Myshkin (The Idiot), Shatov (The Possessed) and Makar (A Raw Youth). He is, however, healthier and less complicated than any of his predecessors, though he shares with them a certain immediacy and childlikeness of response, insight into the hidden thoughts of others, compassion and humility.
Ivan’s relationship to his father is seen differently by different people. Fyodor does not see himself in Ivan and Ivan loathes and rejects the old man. Ivan certainly experiences a love of life but, above all, his energies are channelled into thought, a thought racked with his own inner contradictions based, one would surmise, on his repression of the Karamazov inheritance. However that may be, Ivan is doomed to neurotic inactivity and indecision in the world of action.
Dialogue in Dostoevsky means not just the coexistence of independent and distinctive voices. It means being able to absorb aspects of the voice of another and exerting influence over the other’s voice. The examples given show how Fyodor Karamazov’s voice is partly absorbed (and modified) in his sons. But we also observe Zosima’s influence on Alyosha, Ivan’s on Smerdyakov, Alyosha’s on Kolya. And we may note that the whole novel can be read as an extension of Ivan’s voice (point-of-view), or Alyosha’s or Mitya’s. In extreme cases (but not unusual ones in Dostoevsky) characters have ‘doubles’. This term is sometimes used to denote conflicting ‘personalities’ in the same character. Sometimes it is used to refer to a projection of some aspect of a character’s personality with which the character enters into dialogue. The classic case occurs in Dostoevsky’s early novel The Double where the hero meets his Doppelganger. The most striking case in this story is, of course, Ivan’s conversation with his devil representing aspects of his personality he wants to disown but cannot. The third use of the term ‘double’ indicates secondary characters who seem to embody one significant aspect of a main character’s personality. Such is Smerdyakov’s relationship to Ivan.
Dostoevsky often brings divergent and conflicting personalities together in scenes of excruciating embarrassment, variously known as his ‘conclaves’ or ‘scandal scenes’. Possibly the most memorable of these in The Brothers Karamazov occurs in the monastery in Part I, Book Two. Typically Dostoevsky sets the scene in a place and on an occasion where a high degree of social decorum is expected. Any breach of it will inevitably cause offence and embarrassment. He places there at least one character who sets great store by the preservation of this decorum but who is on edge in fear of a disaster. He also introduces a number of other characters who in a variety of ways are likely to cause some sort of scandal — perhaps because this kind of decorum goes against their normal inclinations. But they are also predisposed to do things to upset each other; their personalities and interests are bound to clash and since they are all play-acting to some degree, they may try to ‘unmask’ each other and show up the other’s lie. Interestingly, it is not the monks who are embarrassed. Equally interestingly, Zosima accurately diagnoses the source of Fyodor Karamazov’s provocative behaviour, advising him not to lie, above all to himself. The victims of the scandal are Miusov and the Karamazovs.