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 Doublewhere 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 Karamazovoccurs 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.
Another memorable scandal scene, though played out on a less public stage, is described in the chapter ‘The Two Together’, in which Grushenka has lured Katerina into pouring out her heart, only to turn on the girl and humiliate her, finally revealing in a parting taunt that she knows her awful secret. Katerina is devastated in Alyosha’s presence, just as Grushenka had planned. At a time when Katerina is emotionally vulnerable she proffers love and then cruelly withdraws it. She calls attention to areas of Katerina’s personality of which Katerina is but dimly aware and which she is unwilling to recognize. She stimulates her emotionally in a situation where it is disastrous for her to respond. She exposes her almost simultaneously to stimulation and frustration and switches from one emotional wavelength to another while on the same topic. Finally, she blames Katerina for provoking the scene which she has herself engineered. These are akin to the strategies which the psychologist R. D. Laing has identified as causing the most intense emotional confusion. They can be found at work frequently between Dostoevsky’s characters.
But the ‘multivoicedness’ of Dostoevsky’s novel is not restricted to dialogue between and within the characters and the narrator. It has other important functions. One of them involves the constant echoes of other texts. Of course if one actually knows these texts intimately the echoes are richer and more thought-provoking. Otherwise they appear as little more than unfamiliar quotations. Footnotes can do little to repair this deficiency. Still, if one is aware of the precursor voices summoned up through the shared memory of author and reader one still senses that multidimensionality which is one of the glories of The Brothers Karamazov.Such awareness may stimulate all sorts of reflections which the author was unaware of, especially if the ‘allusions’ one detects are to texts which post-date the novel. Some would call such connections misreading. Others would point to them as evidence of Dostoevsky’s extraordinary powers of anticipation.
The novel contains over eighty quotations from the Bible alone. Over forty different sources are mentioned or quoted by Ivan in ‘The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor’. In addition quotations from hagiography and religious folklore, Pushkin, Schiller, Shakespeare, Nekrasov, Herzen, Pecherin, Polezhaev and others, not to mention contemporary journalism, abound throughout the novel. The end-notes to this edition will indicate the sources of some of them. But, as Nina Perlina has pointed out, their significance does not end with their place in the text or the associations they may have in our memories of their sources. Sometimes, for example, sources are reaccen-tuated and misquoted, and this may play an important role in characterization. Perlina notes that in his drafts to Part I of the novel, Dostoevsky wrote,
Most important... the landowner quotes from the Gospel and makes a crude mistake. Miusov corrects him and he makes even worse errors. Even the scholar makes mistakes. No-one knows the Gospel. ‘Blessed is the womb that bore thee,’ ... said Christ... It is not Christ who said that ...
Sometimes, of course, there is no quotation or overt allusion, but the well-read reader will catch the tones of other texts, and the likeness is so compelling one suspects that such texts have served Dostoevsky as models, even unconsciously. Hackel’s view that Dostoevsky must have modelled his presentation of Zosima in part on the Bishop Bienvenu in Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérablesis based partly on such intuitions and partly on Dostoevsky’s known admiration for the book.