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Dostoevsky finally won the universal recognition he had always longed for in the last years of his life. While recounting Dostoevsky's special relationship with the Russian ruling clique, Joseph Frank, emeritus professor emeritus of Princeton University and Stanford University in the United States, also details his ongoing rivalry with Turgenev and Tolstoy in his five-volume book Dostoevsky. Less than a year before his death in June 1880, the appearance of the Pushkin Memorial marked the culmination of Dostoevsky's literary career – and his life as a spokesman for the Russian spirit. His famous speech on Pushkin at the event lifted the audience's emotions and boiled with enthusiasm: "We do not rely on the universality of the sword soldiers, but on the strength of fraternity, on our concerted efforts to reunite mankind into a big family." This is Dostoevsky, who has become a world literary heritage, although he still cannot embody such lofty ideals at every moment.
The writer's death in St. Petersburg in January 1881 brought to an end this unparalleled literary biography. This is a truly biographical work of Dostoevsky's genius, and worthy of the extraordinary era he experienced and the magical land in which he lived.
The three brothers are not only representatives of faith, emotion and reason
Zhang Hui: If we open the novel and see in the preface, the narrator has set the time of the novel 13 years ago. Extrapolating from the time when the novel was written, 13 years ago was probably around 1865. If you look at the novel itself, you will find that there are some details in it, pointing to the era at that time. For example, in Russia in the 1860s, the jury system emerged. In the last part of the novel, during the trial of Mijia, the jury ends up playing a very big role in deciding whether Mika is guilty or not, which points to the historical background at that time.
Let's take a look at the main characters in the novel. The relationship between the characters is already very friendly, and there are not many main characters, of course, around the three Brothers Karamazov. Fyodor Karamazov is the father of Karamazov, who appears in the novel. In the novel, he is married twice and has a child with his first wife, Dmitry Karamazov, the eldest of Karamazov's brothers.
Names change frequently in Russian novels, and Dmitry is the daimyō who is used in formal situations. In novels you often see Mika (as opposed to Dmitry), which is his nickname, and needs to take some small notes at the beginning. His nicknames may be more than one, Mickenka, Michusa, and so on.
Fyodor Karamazov's second marriage had two more children, namely, Kalamazov's second brother Ivan and younger brother Alexei. A name that often appears in novels is Alyosha, and Alyosha is Alexei's nickname.
In addition to the three Karamazov brothers, there is a fourth brother, or half brother, called Skargakov, who is rumored to be the son of the elder Karamazov and a mad woman in the town, and Skargakov is also a Karamazov brother by blood. Skargakov also plays a very important role in the novel's father-killing case, and you can pay attention to it.
Turning the novel open, the first main character is Alexei Karamazov, whose nickname is Alyosha. Alexei also has a prototype in reality, and his name refers to the ancient Roman saint Saint Aristo, who is also one of the archetypes. Some of the details of the life of Uncle St. Ariel recorded in the Biography of the Saint are very similar to Alexei, especially the way he got along with the children. At the same time, Alyosha also lived and studied in the monastery and embarked on a monastic career.
Dostoevsky set up a character like Alyosha, who at first wanted to write a story similar to the Biography of the Saint. The biography of the saints is a common subject in ancient Greek, Roman, and Ancient Rus literature, and writes about ordinary people like saints.
Alyosha was a precocious philanthropist. In the text, a word is used to describe: the lover of mankind. Although Alyosha is in the monastery, he has been talking to all kinds of people around him, and he is more of a listener in the novel, listening to Mika's confession, listening to Ivan's confession, listening to the voices of many other marginal characters, and he is a character who connects many characters. At the same time, his mentor-apprentice relationship with Elder Zosima is also an important part of the drama of the novel.
The youngest of the three brothers was Alyosha, and the oldest was Dmitry, also known as Mika. We often say that in The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha, Miga, and Ivan represent the three aspects of human nature, Alyosha represents faith, Mika represents emotion, and Ivan represents reason. Such an interpretation is actually superficial, and there is a conflict between rationality and sensibility in the heart of each character. Dmitry actually has such a conflict in his heart, and in the very important chapter of the novel, "Confession of a Hot Heart", it is mentioned that in the human mind, there are at the same time the ideals of Sodom and the ideals of the Virgin Mary. He used this to describe himself: in my blood flowed the factor of Karamazov, it was an ideal of Sodom, an ideal of sensualism. On the other side is the ideal of repentance towards the Virgin Mary. His personality is very divided and extreme.
The name Dmitry also has literary allusions. In ancient Greek mythology, Dmitry corresponds to the image of demeter's god of agriculture, and in Dmitry's confession, details related to Demeter, such as the secret ceremony of Eleuther, are also mentioned, which is also part of the ancient Greek worship of Demeter.
The names of the first two characters both point to literary allusions, and the name Ivan is reminiscent of the biblical John the Baptist or St. John the Baptist. Ivan is obviously very different from the image of both Johns. If one studies Russian history, including reading Frank's biography, one finds that Ivan embodies the characteristics of several Russian real-life figures. One of the figures is Vladimir Solovyov, who put forward the idea of anthology, that is, the transfer of god's ideals to man, and Ivan seems to be connected. Ivan's core idea, we might call anti-theism.
Ivan is a russian civilian intellectual who has just graduated from college and makes a living writing articles. Civilian intellectuals are very common in Dostoevsky's work and are consistent protagonists of his work. In Crime and Punishment there is Raskolnikov, and in The Crowd there is also Peter Verhovinsky, both of which are dostoevsky's generalizations and reflections of the various intellectuals in Russian society at that time.
Representative Ivan questioned the faith in the hearts of the populists of the late 1970s in Russia. Ivan is asking: Where is justice? Ivan is a man with a strong sense of justice and an antitheist who carries justice. Why is he an anti-theist and not an atheist? In his dialogue with God, Ivan is more against the world God created than against God Himself. His monologues are all based on the existence of God, against the world God created. Antitheism is also a very important concept in The Brothers Karamazov.
In addition to these three brothers, the novel has two important female characters, one is Katerina Ivanovna and the other is Grushenka. Katerina was Dmitry's fiancée, and there are two types in Dostoevsky's work, one is the docile person and the other is called the fierce (predatory) person. More ferocity can be seen in Katerina, she does not want to plunder material, she wants to plunder the dignity of Dmitry. She and Dmitry tortured each other and fought over the moral high ground.
Grushenka, on the other hand, explores some questions from the perspective of basic human dignity, and Glushenka has childlike eyes. Mika is pursuing her, they have a spiritual connection, they are all looking at things through the eyes of children, they all act according to instinct, and at the same time they have a natural goodness in their hearts, and they will repent and reflect from nature. Grushenka has a very important symbolic image, the onion, which is also the core image in the novel.
Finally, there is Elder Zosima, who is derived from several real character archetypes, the character of Zosima is real in history, and the novel combines the real Zosima and other figures. Zosima can be said to represent Dostoevsky's point of view, and the elders conveyed Dostoevsky's own voice through preaching and telling their own experiences.
"Euclid" and "Father and Son"
Zhang Hui: It can be said that every chapter of "The Brothers Karamazov" contains the ideas of the whole book. The two most thoughtful and in-depth chapters to pick out are Rebellion and The Lords of Religion.
These two chapters take place in the dialogue between Ivan and Alyosha. Before this conversation, the two brothers had not yet communicated in the true sense of the word, and one day the two sat together, and Ivan, a university intellectual who made a living by writing, and the trainee monk of the monastery sat together, and such a dialogue was produced. Ivan was mainly talking, Alyosha was listening. Ivan said these two passages, one of which is in the chapter "Rebellion". He raises the theodic question of the contradiction between an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God and the omnipresent evil of the world. As soon as Ivan came up, he said that assuming that God existed, the most extreme evil of why there are so many children in the world suffering is violence against children. This chapter mentions how the Turks let dogs out and bite children, how the Russian landlords abused children, and so on, all in the end to prove that the world created by God is problematic. The evil that prevails in the world and the last harmonious kingdom of heaven promised by God are broken.
To paraphrase the current concept of cultural diversity, Ivan shows the diversity of evil in the chapter "Rebellion", and he writes about the universal evil of human nature that exists in all peoples, nations, and places. "If the suffering of the children is to make up for the total amount of suffering necessary for the purchase of truth, I declare in advance that the truth is not worth the price." He said that assuming that the moment when the final harmonious heaven came to earth really came, I would rather give up the ticket to heaven, and I would rather give it back to God.
In this chapter, he rebels against God in the name of righteousness, against the Holy Father. Here we can see that there was a dialogue between Dostoevsky and the Russian intellectuals of the time. To give an example, there was a Populist poet named Nekrasov in the Russian literary scene at that time. He wrote a poem called "The Cry of the Children," which also conveys a sense of righteous grief and indignation, linked to the emotion conveyed by Ivan in the chapter "Rebellion."
Such sentiments are pervasive among Russian intellectuals, who ask the question of the times: Why is there so much suffering? Mika also asks, he dreamed of a skinny mother holding a crying baby in a snowstorm, why is this child suffering? Why are children crying? The coachman said, "They are poor people who have burned everything by the fire." They don't have bread. "But what he's actually asking is, why are all the children crying?" Why is all suffering happening? He was asking this question from a human perspective.
If Ivan rebelled against God in "Rebellion," then in "The Patriarch" he rebelled against the Son. Ivan himself made up a story by the Religious High Justice, which takes place in Seville in the 16th century. Someone witnessed a scene of a religious court where Jesus Christ returned to earth and suddenly appeared before the religious justices. But instead of welcoming him, the religious magistrate imprisoned Jesus Christ for questioning. At the heart of this question is why you didn't accept the temptation of the devil, an allusion to the temptation of the devil from the Gospels.) Simply put, the devil proposes three temptations, and if you turn the stone into bread and people follow you because they see miracles, this first temptation is rejected by Jesus; the second temptation is that you jump off a cliff and are caught by angels, and people will believe you, because you show the mystery, and Jesus also refuses; the third temptation is that if you surrender to Me, I will give you the land and the people, and you will have authority, and Jesus still refuses. Why did he refuse? Because man has a choice, man has the freedom of belief. But the religious justices did not think so, arguing that freedom was a burden for human beings, that freedom meant responsibility, and that man could not afford it.
The Judges of Religion rebelled against Christ from the perspective of Christ with love for mankind. In order to protect people, to make them live well, I turned stones into bread, I gave them mysteries, I conquered them with the sword of the Pope of Rome and Caesar. These three forces on earth that can forever conquer and capture the consciences of these weak-willed rebels and bring them happiness are miracles, mysteries, and authority. Religious justices believe that this is what people really need, and they do not need freedom.
This was Ivan's second rebellion. Frank's biography of Dostoevsky also mentions that here Dostoevsky is talking to many literary allusions, and the religious justice has appeared in many previous literary works, including Dostoevsky in "Idiots" and "The Devil". For example, in Schiller's work Don Carlos, there is also a character, the Marquis of Poza. He said a passage about why God gave man freedom and why he allowed the evil of the world to persist.
("He... In order not to destroy the intoxicating/free vision—/He allows terrible evil forces/rampant in his world") Why is evil released, because man still has the right to choose freedom of belief. For example, in Victor Hugo's book "Ninety-Three Years", there are also two opposing views, one of which is a character named Guo Wen, who holds a utopian ideal of freedom, equality and fraternity, and the opposition to him is his master Symurdon, who wants to establish a legal state, and here a key word appears: "Euclid". Guo Wen said that if Simulden wanted to establish a state with legal power, he would inevitably think that man was created by Euclid. Euclid represents a materialist view. Euclid's world does not allow for free existence, only cold numbers and matter, no free space. For Ivan, there was also a lot of Euclid in his faith.
In The Brothers Karamazov there are corresponding themes. The first is the theme of father and son, which is superficially a suspenseful case of father-killing, but indeed revolves around the contradiction between the elder Karamazov and his three sons. When Dostoevsky conceived this work, he proposed a title called "Father and Son", and if he was familiar with Russian literature, he would definitely be related to Turgenev's novel "Father and Son", which was a problem that the Russian literary circles had been exploring at that time. The Son's rebellion and rebellion against the Father not only means rebellion against patriarchal society at the family level, but also alludes to the rebellion against the imperial power and even the theocracy, where patriarchy, imperial power, and theocracy are linked. The relationship between the Father and the Son reflects the relationship between man and God, the Son's rebellion against the Father and man's rebellion against God, and in Dostoevsky here are two themes linked together.
At the same time, the work has a intellectual and emotional impact on the human level, and at the theistic level, there is a confrontation between justice and faith. Finally, we can say that this novel deals with the relationship between Russia and the West and the world, and in the novel the elder Karamazov quotes some words said by European and French thinkers such as Voltaire and Montesquieu, and deliberately distorts it in a vulgar way and deduces it to the extreme. Synonymous with power in The Lords of the Religion is the sword of the Holy See and Caesar. The novel also has some minor characters, such as Radkin and Miusov, who quote European ideas at every turn. What Dostoevsky wants to ask is, where did these populist, nihilistic ideas in Russia come from? The roots are from Europe.
It is not a speculative fiction, it involves metaphysical problems
Wei Dong: The theme of our activity today is to follow Joseph Frank's five-volume biography of Dostoevsky and read the writer's tome," The Brothers Karamazov. I am Wei Dong, the literary editor-in-chief of Guangxi Normal University Press Shanghai Company, and I am surrounded by a special guest invited today, Zhang Hui, a teacher at Shanghai University of Foreign Chinese.
Mr. Zhang is an expert in the study of Russian literature, and today I will start with the fifth volume of this biography, and Mr. Zhang will share the great work of "The Brothers Karamazov" in detail for us.
Today's event originated from a series of books "Literary Monuments" by Guangxi Normal University Press. Dostoevsky's biographies, memoirs, and diaries are the cornerstones of our series, while the five-volume biography of Dostoevsky, professor emeritus of Princeton University and Stanford University, is the crowning work of the entire series. The set is divided into five volumes, the first volume was published in 2014, like an American drama, season after season, and the fifth volume is finally published now.
Frank's biography is truly imposing. Divided into five volumes, the first is from Towon's initial entry into the literary world, which tells of his arrest and exile in Siberia because of the Petraszewski Group Incident; the second volume is about his crucifixion between 1850 and 1859; the third volume is about his magazine in the early 1860s, and his return to the Russian literary scene through a series of works, of which "The Basement Notebook" became a watershed in his creation and the original motivation for Frank's writing of this biography; the fourth volume is about his world-famous novels "Crime and Punishment", "Idiot". The fifth volume records the last decade of Dostoevsky's life, which reached the pinnacle of his reputation and the pinnacle of his literary creation through the publication of the novel "The Boy", the creation of the private magazine "The Writer's Diary", the creation of "The Brothers Karamazov" and his inaugural speech on the Pushkin statue in Moscow. The fifth volume deals with the last glorious decade of Dostoevsky's life, during which the creation of The Brothers Karamazov was the signature work of Dostoevsky's peak. This work is also an epoch-making milestone in the history of world literature. Although the novel is the longest of Tovon's works, it is not difficult to read in fact. Next, I would like to share our own interesting experience with Tovon, especially the Brothers Karamazov.
(Unfinished, see three articles for follow-up content)
(This section is an interview with Joseph Frank for the book Dostoevsky, published with permission from The Shanghai Bebet Guangxi Normal University Press.) ）
| of Humanities and Social Sciences Translated book | literature
Dostoevsky
By Joseph Frank
Translated by Dai Dahong and Liu Jialin
Shanghai Babet Guangxi Normal University Press
March 2022
Joseph Frank (1918–2013) Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Princeton University and Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. His five-volume dostoevsky (1976-2002) has won the National Book Critics Club Award (in the biography category), the Christian Gauss Award twice (of the American College Distinguished Student Association), the James Russell Lowell Award (of the Modern Language Association), the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and other honors. He is also the author of Russian Prism: Essays on Literature and Culture (1990), Spatial Forms of the Modern Novel (1991), Between Religion and Reason: Essays on Russian Literature and Culture (2010), Responding to Modernity: Essays on Cultural Politics (2012), and Dostoevsky's Lectures (2020).
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Duty Editor-in-Chief | Zhang Ying
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