Last summer, I read Brothers Karamazov for the first time, and this past term, I read The Double, Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment and then Brothers K again.

This experience was incredible. It was something spiritual and life giving. It also helped expand my imagination and helped me see myself and the world in new ways.

Here is my reflection on this experience.

I know I could never get close to touching everything in this book, and in fact, if anything has kept me from writing this reflection, it is the fear of too far understating what is there, or the worry that even just writing this down it will take these moments and characters and box them into an analysis instead of the living and beautiful beings that they are. Indeed, as the Underground Man makes clear, humans are not able to be boiled down to their calculated pieces. But all this set aside, here I present a few learnings and a few things that have stuck out.

I wrote a lot. Don’t feel the need to read through one end to the other.

Also, don’t read the content reflection until you have read at least Brothers K. It is far better to encounter these characters at the source than let my babble steal this first voyage.

First a sketch of Dostoevsky the dude:

Lived 1821-1881. Born in Moscow. His father was a domestic despot, though he was against corporal punishment and sent his kids to private school, and his mother was kind an compassionate. Dostoevsky was sent to engineering school in Petersberg but withdrew within himself and in reading, disliking the machine-like discipline of the school. This was during the time of Nicholas the 1st, the “policeman of Europe”, who ruled with an iron fist and created the table or ranks — a highly structured meritocratic social hierarchy.

Gogol’s Overcoat had a big influence on him, and Dostoevsky wrote Poor Folk two years later (1845) which was an immediate success. The fame got to his head. He wrote The Double the following year.

Around the same time he joined a socialist group. In 1949 he was arrested for being a part of the group, was imprisoned for 9 months with other, and sentenced to death in Semyonovsky Square with the other socialists rounded up. He was in the second round of prisoners to be shot that morning.

Moments before the call to fire the shot, a messenger galloped in, announcing that the tsar had changed his mind and that they were to be sentenced to Siberia instead.

This experience rocked his world. He wrote to his brother, Mikhail, “Brother! I have not become downhearted or low-spirited. Life is everywhere life, life in ourselves, not in what is outside us. There will be people near me, and to be a man among people and remain a man forever, not to be downhearted nor to fall in whatever misfortunes may befall me—this is life; this is the task of life. I have realized this. This idea has entered into my flesh and into my blood.” “When I look back at the past and think how much time has been wasted in vain, how much time was lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in ignorance of how to live, how I did not value time, how often I sinned against my heart and spirit—my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each minute might have been an age of happiness. Si jeunesse savait! [If youth knew!] Now, changing my life, I am being reborn into a new form. Brother! I swear to you that I shall not lose hope and shall preserve my spirit and heart in purity. I shall be reborn to a better thing. That is my whole hope, my whole comfort!”

While in Siberia, he did hard labor alongside common criminals, and got to know the common people of Russia well. This understanding of the Russian peasantry is demonstrated in his later novels.

Five years later, with a change of the tsar and an increased progressivism, his sentence was reduced again, to serve in the military, and then due to the deterioration of his health, in 1859 he was allowed to return to his literary career. He started a literary magazine called Time which was moderately liberal for the time.

In 1861 was the Russian emancipation of the Serfs, which left both the serfs unhappy because they didn’t have any land and the owners upset because they felt like they should have been compensated. This led to hysteria, and was blamed on the young nihilist youth.

He had married a woman after leaving Siberia, but they had a troubled marriage. Both she and Dostoevsky’s dear brother, Mikhail, died of consumption (Tuberculosis) in 1864. That same year he wrote Notes from Underground.

He eventually married another, the stenographer of his book The Gambler, and their marriage was a more happy one, though they lost his first daughter and later a son, Alexey. It was the death of his son and a trip he took to an elder at a monastery in northern Russia that led Dostoevsky to write Brother’s Karamazov.

A typical day for Dostoevsky after this time was to wake up late, go to the coffeehouse and read the paper until dinner, and then stay up until three or four in the morning writing.

Dostoevsky was a chainsmoker and had epilepsy. He commonly experienced headaches and brain fog. He died of Emphysema, which came on because of his smoking.

Dostoevsky’s Writing

Dostoevsky is powerful for a few reasons. He explores modern personality: more individualized, less family, less religious, man without God, religion in relation to this, consumerism, the modern morality. He writes the individual self-consciousness, and explores life in the extremes and how each character confronts such.

He goes to the depths to uncover truth. He writes in dialogues — confession, deep conversation from the heart — of characters in the extreme.

He wrote in response to and against certain “new ideas” of his day

• Chernevsky

  • Rational Egoism: maximum happiness is attained through the rational pursuit of self interest

  • Materialism: everything has a rational and material explanation; there is no free will; progress is inevitable; developed out of Hegel and Feuerbach

• Charles Fourier

  • Utopian Socialism: Utopian Socialism: with a better understanding of (a materialist) human psychology, we can rationally reorganize society and labor into social harmony

• Utilitarianism

  • that the ends justify the means

Notes from Underground

The Underground Manifesto: that man is not a piano key, or a sprig in an organ.

It is a critique of Chernyshevsky’s materialism and rational egoism. Man would rather do what he wants and even to inflict suffering upon himself than to do than live a purely rational life bent on self interest.

Notes from Underground, Chapter 8: “Shower upon [man] every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself—as though that were so necessary—that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar.

And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object—that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated—chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don’t know?

You will scream at me (that is, if you condescend to do so) that no one is touching my free will, that all they are concerned with is that my will should of itself, of its own free will, coincide with my own normal interests, with the laws of nature and arithmetic.

Good heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two make four? Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant that!”

His critique reminds me of Chesterton’s critique of modern society in Outline of Sanity, that we lives our lives in such grooves. This is not the way for humans to flourish, and humans will rebel against all and go mad before existing in such a way.

The Double

I wrote a reflection on the double and published it after reading it: https://mirror.xyz/jbrustkern.eth/BHwrXz5OqrrCXR_-siwRYZdZfBENhW-HM-GfpgL7tPA

The book follows a man in a similarly highly hierarchical society, who is consumed by the existence of a double and driven to despair. When he “comes to his senses” as the prodigal’s son and runs to the metaphorical father, he is not embraced but is misunderstood.

The machine of a society doesn’t address man or man’s needs. It is a false idol, a false savior.

-- Brothers K and Crime and Punishment --

I can’t and don’t want to try to pick up on half of what’s here, but here are some notable things:

John 12:24

This is the opening of Brothers K:

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit”

This passage communicates a bedrock truth that the novel is built upon.

The odd one

Brother’s K also opens with a note “from the author”, naming Alyosha his hero. He writes that he is worried he will not prove his noteworthiness to the reader. He continues explaining, that in a time where all try to unite particulars and make some sense of the senseless, it’s easy to disregard the “odd”. But in fact, “it sometimes happens that it is precisely he who bears within himself the heart of the whole, while the other people of his epoch have all for some reason been torn away from it for a time by some kind of flooding wind.”

“Live a life that doesn’t make sense.”

Skandalon

Skandelon, revenge, and being defined by sin drive the darkness that rips apart characters in Brothers K.

When Katya ignored Mitya who tried to talk to her at the party, he vowed he’d get revenge. (p111) He does so through skandalon — offering money for her body — and she falls for it. Katerina Ivanova is defined by her sin. She thinks Mitya had been laughing at her, and out of pride, she attached herself to him, “with a hysterical and strained love, love out of wounded pride, a love that resembles not love but revenge”. (p688)

Out of this strained love, she tests him dishonestly and malignantly, in the guise of trust and love, and skandalon’s the three thousand to Mitya. Mitya falls for it, and drowns in his sin. “I kept saying to myself every day and every hour: ‘You are a thief, you are a thief!’ And that’s why I raged all month, that’s why I fought in the tavern, that's why I beat my father, because I felt I was a thief!” (p493). He sees himself defined by this sin, and this drives him mad, leading him to nearly murderer his father and commit suicide.

Either could have stopped sin’s domino effect with humble forgiveness. Mitya - letting go at or after the ball; Katya - not holding onto her grudge against him. But alas, neither do. This forgiveness would not have been rational. But it is what would have worked.

The Onion is the Inverse of Skandalon

We are given the story of the onion, how a very wicked peasant woman had once plucked an onion from her garden and given it to a beggar woman.

When Alyosha, the beloved one, falls and is in the room of the harlot, it is Grushenka who gives him an onion. In the text, Grushenka’s leaping up in fright and crossing herself appears a continuation of her facetiousness at first glance, but there must have been some genuineness in it, some love, because of how Alyosha recognized it. “She spared me just you…you restored my soul”, he says. He goes on, telling how he sees she is higher in love than himself, now understanding how she forgave her lover the torment he left her with at his first word of return.

Grushenka gave Alyosha an onion. She did a good deed. A humble love. She sees him in the best of ways. This brings Alyosha back to the path of life. It leads him back to treat himself, Rakitin and Grushenka rightly. It sets him back to the monastery, to the Elder, to prayer, and to the Wedding of Cana.

Indifference

Sodom (and paradise) is brought on not by suffering but by each characters thoughts and actions. One commonality within Sodom is an indifference.

“the opposite of love is indifference.” - Stubborn Love

When Svidrigailov is in the depths of Sodom, he is annoyed by the idea of getting involved with the innocent child weeping out of fear for being beaten. Ivan too is tempted to a determinist mindset, that all has happened many times before so as to catechize him in a moral relativity where “everything is permitted”, and one can “jump lightheartedly over any former moral obstacle of the former slave-man.” When Alyosha follows Raskitin’s lead to Grushenka’s he recalls, “I came here seeking my own ruin, saying: ‘Who cares, who cares?’”

This is akin to Adam and Eve’s sin of pride. It yields indifference.

If indifference is the opposite of love, then it may be the greatest sin of all. It is rampant today. And not complete indifference, but indifference to the things that matter.

Today, part of the way the devil stokes indifference in us is by bringing us between the extreme’s, for example, between a person from feeling that he has to change the world, to them failing to do so or being overwhelmed by the challenge, and then bringing him to an in-between space of numbness. Or making some one thing feel like it’s everything, it succeeding or failing as we’re hoping, and being left in a state of incompleteness, that can best be coped with by numbing in indifference.

I see this also at school, where there is such a culture to do everything and to take advantage of every second of the day. A second of downtime seems out of place, a waste of time. In this mode, when we stretch ourselves to the limit, we end up spending a lot of time worrying about how we’re going to finish everything and busied in mental gymnastics trying to figure out how we’re going to fit it all in. It brings us to do the bare minimum in our commitments, classes, and relationships. It leaves us worn down, barren and indifferent.

The temptation today is to do everything and to do nothing. To bring us racing to our deathbed at a hundred miles an hour, and then in that moment on that deathbed, glancing back, to shrivel in sadness, at the realization that we had not lived.

Sodom: Confusion

Confusion is often the product of over reliance on the rational in figuring out a dilemma. It is brought on with the play between the extremes that Ivan and Raskolnikov experience. The Devil doesn’t want Ivan to believe in him or not believe, so he toys with him. He tells a story of a man in eternity making his way to heaven and his rejoicing at having reached it, but the very story itself runs counter to an all-loving God, adding fire in the struggle of figuring out where the truth lies.

Raskolnikov spends a month in his room, trying to figure out whether he should kill the old woman or not. A double forms in his mind, one representing each pole of the struggle. Like Goliadkin who experiences a double and becomes consumed by it, Raskolnikov is overcome with the struggle. A massive machine builds up in his mind, one engine on one side gridlocked above and toward the center with another massive cog and side of machinery arguing for the other pole. It is not that one side of the argument wins over the other, but the clamoring and fog and annoyance of the machine in his mind overwhelms him all that month. He wants it to stop. So he goes to the old woman. And at the moment standing before her, he experiences “a failure of will” and brings the ax down on the woman as if a “piece of his clothing had been caught in the cogs of the machine and he was being dragged in”. (p74) He wasn’t an active being at that moment but an animal, numbed by his mind’s machine to the point that he experiences a failure of will. It is not so often the right or wrong conclusion that we draw about a matter, but the effect of this struggle that can be used to wreak such havoc.

This all is at odds with one who desires to be a saint. A saint squanders themself on others. A saint has peace. A saint hears the word of God, and responds to it. A saint loves. A saint is prudent. A saint lives life in the present.

Who Saves?

Many C&P and Brothers K characters need saving. Many characters try to save themselves or put their trust in others to save them. But man is only saved by God.

When they try to save themselves, it never works out. This is seen in big ways with Mitya being blinded by his focus on getting that salvific three thousand. Mitya doesn’t actually need it, he just feels like he does to get even with Katya. Only after his impossible prayer does he begin to experience saving.

Then what brings about life?

Prayer brings about Mitya’s renewal. When he steps away from the noise at Mokroye, “the fresh air revived him. He stood alone in the darkness, in a corner, and suddenly clutched his head with both hands.” This brought him to clarity in both extremes: one, that now would be the best time to commit suicide, and also he saw how Grushenka loved him and he said a prayer “God, restore him who was struck down at the fence! Let this terrible cup pass from me! You worked miracles, O Lord, for sinners like me!…I will return the stolen money.”

When he had finished his impossible prayer, “it was as if a ray of some bright hope shone on him in the darkness”. He tore himself away and ran back to her, his queen, because “isn’t one hour, one minute of her love worth the rest of my [Mitya’s] life, even in the torments of disgrace.” Mitya still has a long way to go from here, nor is it even perfect, elevating a human to the status of infinite and saving. But the pendulum swings hard and in the right direction, leading him back toward the path of life, and caused not by his own mechanizing but out of his impossible prayer.

Here I am going to take a pause. I hope to come back soon to at least reflect on Alyosha’s transformation, the message “responsibility for all” and Dostoevsky’s take on suffer. There is so, so much in this book I want to revisit again, but we’ll call a pause on this one for now.

Thank you Dostoevsky for the books of a lifetime.

Onward and Upward!

Last summer, I read Brothers Karamazov for the first time, and this past term, I read The Double, Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment and then Brothers K again.

This experience was incredible. It was something spiritual and life giving. It also helped expand my imagination and helped me see myself and the world in new ways.

Here is my reflection on this experience.

I know I could never get close to touching everything in this book, and in fact, if anything has kept me from writing this reflection, it is the fear of too far understating what is there, or the worry that even just writing this down it will take these moments and characters and box them into an analysis instead of the living and beautiful beings that they are. Indeed, as the Underground Man makes clear, humans are not able to be boiled down to their calculated pieces. But all this set aside, here I present a few learnings and a few things that have stuck out.

I wrote a lot. Don’t feel the need to read through one end to the other.

Also, don’t read the content reflection until you have read at least Brothers K. It is far better to encounter these characters at the source than let my babble steal this first voyage.

First a sketch of Dostoevsky the dude:

Lived 1821-1881. Born in Moscow. His father was a domestic despot, though he was against corporal punishment and sent his kids to private school, and his mother was kind an compassionate. Dostoevsky was sent to engineering school in Petersberg but withdrew within himself and in reading, disliking the machine-like discipline of the school. This was during the time of Nicholas the 1st, the “policeman of Europe”, who ruled with an iron fist and created the table or ranks — a highly structured meritocratic social hierarchy.

Gogol’s Overcoat had a big influence on him, and Dostoevsky wrote Poor Folk two years later (1845) which was an immediate success. The fame got to his head. He wrote The Double the following year.

Around the same time he joined a socialist group. In 1949 he was arrested for being a part of the group, was imprisoned for 9 months with other, and sentenced to death in Semyonovsky Square with the other socialists rounded up. He was in the second round of prisoners to be shot that morning.

Moments before the call to fire the shot, a messenger galloped in, announcing that the tsar had changed his mind and that they were to be sentenced to Siberia instead.

This experience rocked his world. He wrote to his brother, Mikhail, “Brother! I have not become downhearted or low-spirited. Life is everywhere life, life in ourselves, not in what is outside us. There will be people near me, and to be a man among people and remain a man forever, not to be downhearted nor to fall in whatever misfortunes may befall me—this is life; this is the task of life. I have realized this. This idea has entered into my flesh and into my blood.” “When I look back at the past and think how much time has been wasted in vain, how much time was lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in ignorance of how to live, how I did not value time, how often I sinned against my heart and spirit—my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each minute might have been an age of happiness. Si jeunesse savait! [If youth knew!] Now, changing my life, I am being reborn into a new form. Brother! I swear to you that I shall not lose hope and shall preserve my spirit and heart in purity. I shall be reborn to a better thing. That is my whole hope, my whole comfort!”

While in Siberia, he did hard labor alongside common criminals, and got to know the common people of Russia well. This understanding of the Russian peasantry is demonstrated in his later novels.

Five years later, with a change of the tsar and an increased progressivism, his sentence was reduced again, to serve in the military, and then due to the deterioration of his health, in 1859 he was allowed to return to his literary career. He started a literary magazine called Time which was moderately liberal for the time.

In 1861 was the Russian emancipation of the Serfs, which left both the serfs unhappy because they didn’t have any land and the owners upset because they felt like they should have been compensated. This led to hysteria, and was blamed on the young nihilist youth.

He had married a woman after leaving Siberia, but they had a troubled marriage. Both she and Dostoevsky’s dear brother, Mikhail, died of consumption (Tuberculosis) in 1864. That same year he wrote Notes from Underground.

He eventually married another, the stenographer of his book The Gambler, and their marriage was a more happy one, though they lost his first daughter and later a son, Alexey. It was the death of his son and a trip he took to an elder at a monastery in northern Russia that led Dostoevsky to write Brother’s Karamazov.

A typical day for Dostoevsky after this time was to wake up late, go to the coffeehouse and read the paper until dinner, and then stay up until three or four in the morning writing.

Dostoevsky was a chainsmoker and had epilepsy. He commonly experienced headaches and brain fog. He died of Emphysema, which came on because of his smoking.

Dostoevsky’s Writing

Dostoevsky is powerful for a few reasons. He explores modern personality: more individualized, less family, less religious, man without God, religion in relation to this, consumerism, the modern morality. He writes the individual self-consciousness, and explores life in the extremes and how each character confronts such.

He goes to the depths to uncover truth. He writes in dialogues — confession, deep conversation from the heart — of characters in the extreme.

He wrote in response to and against certain “new ideas” of his day

• Chernevsky

  • Rational Egoism: maximum happiness is attained through the rational pursuit of self interest

  • Materialism: everything has a rational and material explanation; there is no free will; progress is inevitable; developed out of Hegel and Feuerbach

• Charles Fourier

  • Utopian Socialism: Utopian Socialism: with a better understanding of (a materialist) human psychology, we can rationally reorganize society and labor into social harmony

• Utilitarianism

  • that the ends justify the means

Notes from Underground

The Underground Manifesto: that man is not a piano key, or a sprig in an organ.

It is a critique of Chernyshevsky’s materialism and rational egoism. Man would rather do what he wants and even to inflict suffering upon himself than to do than live a purely rational life bent on self interest.

Notes from Underground, Chapter 8: “Shower upon [man] every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself—as though that were so necessary—that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar.

And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object—that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated—chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don’t know?

You will scream at me (that is, if you condescend to do so) that no one is touching my free will, that all they are concerned with is that my will should of itself, of its own free will, coincide with my own normal interests, with the laws of nature and arithmetic.

Good heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two make four? Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant that!”

His critique reminds me of Chesterton’s critique of modern society in Outline of Sanity, that we lives our lives in such grooves. This is not the way for humans to flourish, and humans will rebel against all and go mad before existing in such a way.

The Double

I wrote a reflection on the double and published it after reading it: https://mirror.xyz/jbrustkern.eth/BHwrXz5OqrrCXR_-siwRYZdZfBENhW-HM-GfpgL7tPA

The book follows a man in a similarly highly hierarchical society, who is consumed by the existence of a double and driven to despair. When he “comes to his senses” as the prodigal’s son and runs to the metaphorical father, he is not embraced but is misunderstood.

The machine of a society doesn’t address man or man’s needs. It is a false idol, a false savior.

-- Brothers K and Crime and Punishment --

I can’t and don’t want to try to pick up on half of what’s here, but here are some notable things:

John 12:24

This is the opening of Brothers K:

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit”

This passage communicates a bedrock truth that the novel is built upon.

The odd one

Brother’s K also opens with a note “from the author”, naming Alyosha his hero. He writes that he is worried he will not prove his noteworthiness to the reader. He continues explaining, that in a time where all try to unite particulars and make some sense of the senseless, it’s easy to disregard the “odd”. But in fact, “it sometimes happens that it is precisely he who bears within himself the heart of the whole, while the other people of his epoch have all for some reason been torn away from it for a time by some kind of flooding wind.”

“Live a life that doesn’t make sense.”

Skandalon

Skandelon, revenge, and being defined by sin drive the darkness that rips apart characters in Brothers K.

When Katya ignored Mitya who tried to talk to her at the party, he vowed he’d get revenge. (p111) He does so through skandalon — offering money for her body — and she falls for it. Katerina Ivanova is defined by her sin. She thinks Mitya had been laughing at her, and out of pride, she attached herself to him, “with a hysterical and strained love, love out of wounded pride, a love that resembles not love but revenge”. (p688)

Out of this strained love, she tests him dishonestly and malignantly, in the guise of trust and love, and skandalon’s the three thousand to Mitya. Mitya falls for it, and drowns in his sin. “I kept saying to myself every day and every hour: ‘You are a thief, you are a thief!’ And that’s why I raged all month, that’s why I fought in the tavern, that's why I beat my father, because I felt I was a thief!” (p493). He sees himself defined by this sin, and this drives him mad, leading him to nearly murderer his father and commit suicide.

Either could have stopped sin’s domino effect with humble forgiveness. Mitya - letting go at or after the ball; Katya - not holding onto her grudge against him. But alas, neither do. This forgiveness would not have been rational. But it is what would have worked.

The Onion is the Inverse of Skandalon

We are given the story of the onion, how a very wicked peasant woman had once plucked an onion from her garden and given it to a beggar woman.

When Alyosha, the beloved one, falls and is in the room of the harlot, it is Grushenka who gives him an onion. In the text, Grushenka’s leaping up in fright and crossing herself appears a continuation of her facetiousness at first glance, but there must have been some genuineness in it, some love, because of how Alyosha recognized it. “She spared me just you…you restored my soul”, he says. He goes on, telling how he sees she is higher in love than himself, now understanding how she forgave her lover the torment he left her with at his first word of return.

Grushenka gave Alyosha an onion. She did a good deed. A humble love. She sees him in the best of ways. This brings Alyosha back to the path of life. It leads him back to treat himself, Rakitin and Grushenka rightly. It sets him back to the monastery, to the Elder, to prayer, and to the Wedding of Cana.

Indifference

Sodom (and paradise) is brought on not by suffering but by each characters thoughts and actions. One commonality within Sodom is an indifference.

“the opposite of love is indifference.” - Stubborn Love

When Svidrigailov is in the depths of Sodom, he is annoyed by the idea of getting involved with the innocent child weeping out of fear for being beaten. Ivan too is tempted to a determinist mindset, that all has happened many times before so as to catechize him in a moral relativity where “everything is permitted”, and one can “jump lightheartedly over any former moral obstacle of the former slave-man.” When Alyosha follows Raskitin’s lead to Grushenka’s he recalls, “I came here seeking my own ruin, saying: ‘Who cares, who cares?’”

This is akin to Adam and Eve’s sin of pride. It yields indifference.

If indifference is the opposite of love, then it may be the greatest sin of all. It is rampant today. And not complete indifference, but indifference to the things that matter.

Today, part of the way the devil stokes indifference in us is by bringing us between the extreme’s, for example, between a person from feeling that he has to change the world, to them failing to do so or being overwhelmed by the challenge, and then bringing him to an in-between space of numbness. Or making some one thing feel like it’s everything, it succeeding or failing as we’re hoping, and being left in a state of incompleteness, that can best be coped with by numbing in indifference.

I see this also at school, where there is such a culture to do everything and to take advantage of every second of the day. A second of downtime seems out of place, a waste of time. In this mode, when we stretch ourselves to the limit, we end up spending a lot of time worrying about how we’re going to finish everything and busied in mental gymnastics trying to figure out how we’re going to fit it all in. It brings us to do the bare minimum in our commitments, classes, and relationships. It leaves us worn down, barren and indifferent.

The temptation today is to do everything and to do nothing. To bring us racing to our deathbed at a hundred miles an hour, and then in that moment on that deathbed, glancing back, to shrivel in sadness, at the realization that we had not lived.

Sodom: Confusion

Confusion is often the product of over reliance on the rational in figuring out a dilemma. It is brought on with the play between the extremes that Ivan and Raskolnikov experience. The Devil doesn’t want Ivan to believe in him or not believe, so he toys with him. He tells a story of a man in eternity making his way to heaven and his rejoicing at having reached it, but the very story itself runs counter to an all-loving God, adding fire in the struggle of figuring out where the truth lies.

Raskolnikov spends a month in his room, trying to figure out whether he should kill the old woman or not. A double forms in his mind, one representing each pole of the struggle. Like Goliadkin who experiences a double and becomes consumed by it, Raskolnikov is overcome with the struggle. A massive machine builds up in his mind, one engine on one side gridlocked above and toward the center with another massive cog and side of machinery arguing for the other pole. It is not that one side of the argument wins over the other, but the clamoring and fog and annoyance of the machine in his mind overwhelms him all that month. He wants it to stop. So he goes to the old woman. And at the moment standing before her, he experiences “a failure of will” and brings the ax down on the woman as if a “piece of his clothing had been caught in the cogs of the machine and he was being dragged in”. (p74) He wasn’t an active being at that moment but an animal, numbed by his mind’s machine to the point that he experiences a failure of will. It is not so often the right or wrong conclusion that we draw about a matter, but the effect of this struggle that can be used to wreak such havoc.

This all is at odds with one who desires to be a saint. A saint squanders themself on others. A saint has peace. A saint hears the word of God, and responds to it. A saint loves. A saint is prudent. A saint lives life in the present.

Who Saves?

Many C&P and Brothers K characters need saving. Many characters try to save themselves or put their trust in others to save them. But man is only saved by God.

When they try to save themselves, it never works out. This is seen in big ways with Mitya being blinded by his focus on getting that salvific three thousand. Mitya doesn’t actually need it, he just feels like he does to get even with Katya. Only after his impossible prayer does he begin to experience saving.

Then what brings about life?

Prayer brings about Mitya’s renewal. When he steps away from the noise at Mokroye, “the fresh air revived him. He stood alone in the darkness, in a corner, and suddenly clutched his head with both hands.” This brought him to clarity in both extremes: one, that now would be the best time to commit suicide, and also he saw how Grushenka loved him and he said a prayer “God, restore him who was struck down at the fence! Let this terrible cup pass from me! You worked miracles, O Lord, for sinners like me!…I will return the stolen money.”

When he had finished his impossible prayer, “it was as if a ray of some bright hope shone on him in the darkness”. He tore himself away and ran back to her, his queen, because “isn’t one hour, one minute of her love worth the rest of my [Mitya’s] life, even in the torments of disgrace.” Mitya still has a long way to go from here, nor is it even perfect, elevating a human to the status of infinite and saving. But the pendulum swings hard and in the right direction, leading him back toward the path of life, and caused not by his own mechanizing but out of his impossible prayer.

Here I am going to take a pause. I hope to come back soon to at least reflect on Alyosha’s transformation, the message “responsibility for all” and Dostoevsky’s take on suffer. There is so, so much in this book I want to revisit again, but we’ll call a pause on this one for now.

Thank you Dostoevsky for the books of a lifetime.

Onward and Upward!