[boris8826]

In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, a recurring philosophical idea is that the moral man is responsible for (guilty of) everyone’s misdeeds. For example, if man A is beating up man B, then man C who learns of this fact must feel guilt for this misdeed. Dostoyevsky goes through great pains to demonstrate this point. At first glance, this appears bizarre, but less so if we consider that a priest must feel the guilt if in his town there are misdeeds. And just as you must feel related to everyone, so you should love (or care) about everyone.

But this, he says, should not be too quickly generalized to a society. If you love the whole society, he says, rather than particular troubled people (and feel guilt for their misfortune), then all you do is really love yourself. The abstract love for the whole society really is self-absorption. Thus, he argues against egoism.

Another recurrent idea is advocacy of sacrifice, from the Gospel of John 12:24:

Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.

I am quite surprised that Ayn Rand liked Dostoyevsky given the number of bad ideas that are the cornerstone of his novel. 

Also, I found a brilliant theory by A. Razumov that Smerdyakov is not the real murderer, and that the money that Dmitri had on him (1,500 rubles) have a different story than Dmitri stated. Finally, Razumov explains what happened during Katerina’s visit to Smerdyakov. I doubt that his work has been translated to English, but I am going to provide the summary below. 

SPOILERS ALERT

Razumov has 120 pages of arguments, but I am not going to give them all here. I’m just going to outline the key idea.

The first point, widely accepted, is that this is the first novel in a two-part series.  Dostoevsky died a year after publishing the novel, and did not have time to write the second novel. Thus, Dostoevsky is not going to reveal the real punchline until the end of the second novel. 

Also, the storyteller says that in the prologue, and further says that the second novel will be set 13 years after the first. If a real murderer is discovered, Dmitri would be freed earlier than his 20-year term. During these 13 years at work camps exile, Dmitri is going to become more virtuous and return reformed. But the only way he can be freed earlier than the full term, is if the real killer is found. Since no new evidence in favour of Pavel Smerdyakov can appear that wasn’t already presented, there must be a different killer and therefore Pavel is not guilty.

The second point is that the key character is Pavel Smerdyakov. He is the only person who does not receive any love or recognition. Even Alyosha, who has love for everyone, does not give it to Pavel. Pavel fails to get recognition that he is a deserving son of Fyodor either from Ivan (via an intellectual argument) or from Alyosha (via emotional appeal).  Because he has a “stink” associated with him, everyone is eager to point fingers at him that he is the killer.  The lesson that Dostoyevsky wants to teach everyone in the town, and us, the readers, is that we are jumping to conclusions too fast. We are too quick to judge the book by its cover. The suicide of Pavel serves as the seed that died to give rise to new good. Thus, Ivan helps a frozen man, after the third meeting with Pavel, while just before this meeting he let him to die in the cold (this is a reference to the Good Samaritan parable in the Bible).  We would see a lot of this new good play out in the second novel too, as a result of characters realizing their mistake of mistreating Pavel.

The stinking is also dramatized in the decomposing corpse of the monk Zosima, who at death deserved a place of esteem (according to the altruist philosophy espoused in the novel), but whom people are quick to unfairly denigrate because of the corpse’s smell. 

So why did Pavel state that he is the murderer? By the 2nd meeting between Ivan and Pavel, we know that Pavel hoped that Ivan would get enlisted as a co-conspirator and this way Pavel would get a portion of the inherited money as hush money. Pavel, himself, wasn’t risking jail, camps or death by admitting that he is the murderer, because Katerina has brought a doctor who was prepared to give him a diagnosis of a mentally unstable.  (For this Katerina paid 2,000 rubles).  However, after the 3rd meeting Pavel kills himself, and in this meeting he also says that he is the murderer. Why? He did this to sadistically hurt Ivan, as revenge. He knew that Ivan will consider himself to be guilty of murder, and it would drive his mind crazy. This worked, and by the end of the novel Ivan goes sick from insanity.  It is similar, by metaphor, to the sadistic trick Pavel played with the dog, by making it swallow a needle in a piece of bread.  With Ivan, Pavel makes him swallow a needle-like thought that he is the murderer.

This brings us to Katerina: she went to Pavel and gave him 3,000 rubles so that he would state publicly that he is the murderer. Katerina indeed thought that Pavel is the murderer, but wanted to convince him to get into the open about it, with this money. But Pavel returns this money via Ivan, thereby stating that the deal is off.  At this point (in the court-room scene) Kateryna learns that Pavel is not the killer, and assumes for a moment that Dmitri is the killer. For this reason, she decides to save Ivan from suspicion and makes the letter public.

The real killer is an unknown man acting as an accomplice of Rakitin, the latter being the mastermind of a plan to steal 3,000 rubles. The evidence for this is that Rakitin finds Alyosha to sidetrack him from the house of Fyodor, because he knows that Dmitri won’t attempt anything if Alyosha is there. Rakitin planned that Dmitri would kill Fyodor, and that then he would be able to waltz in and pocket the 3,000 rubles that he’s heard are in the house. This he advised his accomplice to do, but because Dmitri didn’t kill Fyodor, Rakitin’s accomplice does the killing.

About the money that Dmitri had on him, namely 1,500 rubles.  We know that much earlier, he was the one who lent 4,500 rubles to Katerina.  Although Katerina paid him back, she is prepared to lend him 4,500 rubles in times of need. Notice that 4,500 minus 3,000 is 1,500. After Dmitri squanders 3,000 she manages to deliver him another 1,500 that he doesn’t spend. The interesting part here is how she gives him the money, in both cases. She thinks that he wouldn’t accept 3,000 from her directly, out of pride. So her idea is to mail the money to her sister who is out of town, and then have her sister mail it back to Dmitri. This way there will be no records in the local post office that she gave money to Dmitri.  When she learns that the 3,000 never got to her sister, she arranges in another way another 1,500 to her sister, without enlisting Dmitri.  When Dmitri receives the 1,500, she wants to know if he will have enough dignity to return to her at least half of the money she lent him. For she knows that the 3,000 he squandered was squandered on her romantic rival. However, Dmitri doesn’t know that Katerina knows about the 1,500, and feels that he is a thief for not returning the debt as soon as he can. 

The above summary ends the key ideas of Razumov’s theory, but I have a personal addition. I theorize that Rakitin’s accomplice, the man who actually murdered Fyodor, is Svetlyakov.  He is the man that Dmitri beat up in public. It is because of this public humiliation that Svetlyakov’s son Ilyusha is on a deathbed. From Svetlyakov’s own words, he can’t afford dying (taking Dimitri on a duel), because his family is poor and he must stay alive to support them.  So, Rakitin approaches Svetlyakov and gives him an opportunity of retribution and a way to support his family. Why is it that Svetlyakov decides to murder Fyodor when he learns that Dmitri didn’t do it? Besides the technical fact that he can’t steal the money without killing Fyodor, Svetlyakov murders him in order to frame Dmitri. He also knows that otherwise Fyodor will talk in town about the event, and humiliate him even more.  Also, he may project his hate of Dmitri onto Fyodor, because both have the same outward crazy personality. Finally, we learn in the last chapter of the novel that Svetlyakov has money. Supposedly this is from the 200 rubles he got from Katerina, and also some additional money he took from Alyosha. But this is mentioned by the storyteller rather briefly. According to my theory, he also has a portion of the stolen money. (In fact, Rakitin could have pocketed all the stolen money, and just agreed to finance Svetlyakov on a regular basis. Rakitin has a stronger hand, since Rakitin has an alibi but Svetlyakov doesn’t. Rakitin can blackmail Svetlyakov, and for this reason Svetlyakov does not want to have a large sum of money on hand, since it is evidence that he was the murderer.)

In his novels, Dostoyevsky used last names that symbolize the character of the person. Raskolnikov is derived from the word “shattering” (Russian: раскол). Karamazov is derived from kara (retribution, punishment) and suffix “mazov” is “anointed.”  Smerdyakov means stench or stink. When we come to the last name Rakitin, we see someone who steals, extorts and blackmails. In present Russia, a widely used word is reket (Russian: рекет) that stands for extortion and blackmail by mafia. The word comes from Italian “ricatto.”

Please note that none of the Karamazovs is virtuous. This much is obvious with Fyodor, Dmitri and Pavel. What about Ivan and Alyosha? According to Dostoevsky, Ivan is morally guilty of the murder because he left the house knowing that a murder may occur in his absence. But what about Alyosha? He also knew that Ivan left, and that his dad is all alone. He says that to Rakitin. But instead of going home and watching his dad, in a pang of rebellion against Zosima’s teachings, he goes with Rakitin to drink vodka, and then to Grushenka for possibly meaningless sex.  When he is at Grushenka’s, and she sits on his lap, he briefly remembers that he must deal with the Dmitri problem, but the thought quickly goes away.

/sb

[AdamWildavsky]

Re: Boris Reitman’s post 104174 of 5/20/24

Thanks for sharing. Now I’ll have to read the novel again! This elaborate theory fails the test of Occam’s Razor, but perhaps that test need not apply to a work of fiction.

*sb

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