I can make nothing of it.
- Dr. Herzenstube, probably
Greetings, fellow Karamazov-readers! By now you should be through Book 4 of the novel. As always, feel free to participate regardless of how far you’ve gotten, but please keep spoilers labeled so that new readers have a chance to discover the material on their own.
Last week we found ourselves in the middle of Dmitri’s stormy love triangle, and we took a closer look at the author’s early concerns as a writer. This week Dostoevsky opens up the scope of the novel a little more by introducing us to another major focus of his concern, “the children.”
A quick note on translation: the title of this book (which reappears in some of the chapter titles) is Надрыв, which loosely translates as “rupture,” “rent,” or “tear”. As Victor Terras noted of the widely-available translations, this “poses a problem”:
Garnett’s “laceration” does not pursue it consistently, losing it as a leitmotif. Pevear uses “strain” consistently, but “strain” is less expressive than nadryv, derived from rvat’, “to tear,” and the prefix nad-, “over.”
- Reading Dostoevsky, p. 155
Notes and Comments:
Because the class differences are never more sharply outlined than in Book Four, I thought this might be a good time to discuss the socioeconomic conditions in Russia in the mid-19th century (I heard you yawning in the back row!) and using that as a segue to the Great Reforms, the important political backdrop to Dostoevsky’s novel. This is a very broad summary: as with all social institutions, there were innumerable exceptions and nuances.
Only a small percentage of Russians in the mid-19th century were not of the peasant class, but even they had a limited buffet of options. In his desire to restrict the ambitions of potential rivals a century before, Emperor Peter the Great had instituted a massive social engineering project called The Table of Ranks. Anyone who wished to be part of any major institution in Russia had to proceed through a ladder of bureaucratic ranks, which refocused their energies on the process of institutional advancement rather than, say, consolidating power, organizing, and plotting against the emperor. Over time the Table expanded and contracted, became stricter or looser, but maintained its general shape until 1917.
There were multiple paths to advancement, like skill trees in RPGs: you could go the military route, the civil service route, even seek to become a member of the court. Only the very topmost ranks were inheritable, so the vast majority of people started on the bottom, with the lowest pay and benefits, and had to work their way up, rung by rung. As Peter predicted, some Russians were obsessed with the process — and this provided Nikolai Gogol with some of his richest satirical material (see e.g. his masterpiece “The Nose”). Meanwhile, people on the lowest rungs were often scrambling for resources, and one could be both on the Table and living in dire poverty.
If you were rich enough, you might forego any ambition and merely waste away on your estate, letting your serfs work the land to maintain your lifestyle. By the early 19th century, the idle rich had produced a generation of well-educated Russians with Nothing to Do, and the Superfluous Man was born, a major trope popularized by Turgenev and the critic Vissarion Belinsky (discussed last week). Needless to say, without the distractions of Peter’s Table, a good number of the socially and politically engaged reformers of the 19th century grow out of this class.
Was there a middle class? This is tough to answer with a direct comparison to its Western counterpart, but in a sense, there was a class of merchants, doctors, and others who'd form a nascent middle class stratum that never quite cohered into the established class we recognize from our own history. There was also a stratum of “in-between” people, the raznochintsy, who are generally well-educated but outside the usual social institutions for reasons ranging from family background to lack of interest. They often became writers and journalists, a major vehicle for the spreading of radical political ideas.
(Naturally, all of the above applied to men only. With rare exception (and often only in the upper echelons of the aristocracy), women were expected to make of themselves ideal wives and mothers.)
(Something else I want to stress here, because I feel like it doesn’t get mentioned enough: of the major contenders for Great 19th Century Russian Novelist, Dostoevsky is the only one unsupported by family wealth — meaning, the only one who had to write to make ends meet, rather than for leisure. Turgenev and Tolstoy were landed gentry, Goncharov from a family of wealthy merchants. Only Leskov came from similarly strained circumstances.)
Meanwhile, nearly 5 out of 6 Russians on the eve of Alexander II’s Great Reforms (1861) were peasants, and about half of those privately owned (the rest were state-owned and/or assigned to certain sectors, like industry or the military, even the Church). Serfdom stretched far back into medieval Russian history, where Boris Godunov laid down strict legal restrictions on peasants’ rights to free movement. Outside the pointed racial element, the worst of serfdom has many parallels to the Atlantic Slave Trade in scope of rights and abuses suffered by those who lived under the system.
There were many factors behind the Emancipation, including generations of reformers and advocates (who often suffered for their advocacy, like the tragic story of Alexander Radishchev), but the one most relevant to us is the claim that, on reading Ivan Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter, the Emperor was so moved by the author’s humanizing portraits of serfs that he resolved to end the institution. (For those interested, Michael Hanne’s The Power of the Story: Fiction and Political Change investigated this theory thoroughly, and suggests that Turgenev did indeed play a role in the process.)
TBK takes place a generation after the Emancipation, where the situation has not gotten much better for the former serfs. The financial arrangements were poorly arranged and insufficient, while most of the property remained with the landowners. Emancipated serfs had to compensate their former owners, so a substantial number of former serfs returned to their land as paid workers, often receiving worse treatment and even less of a legal framework to protect them. Widespread failure of crops and civil unrest soured what should have been a triumphant moment in Russian history.
The other major reform that affects the plot of TBK was the introduction of trial-by-jury, a concept imported from Western Europe as part of a broader set of judicial reforms. We’ll talk more about that, and Dostoevsky’s unease with the new system, when we get to the back half of the novel.
In closing, I should also mention that the Great Reforms inspired a lot of pushback from both sides of the political aisle. Russian conservatives were horrified at the degradation of their historical institutions and the sense they were kowtowing to Western norms. Russian radicals were horrified at how incremental the Reforms were, replacing the Holy Grail of Russian progressive politics — a constitution (and real representative government) — with the weak tea of local councils (zemstvo), a compromise they felt made the chances of constitutional government nearly impossible in the foreseeable future. Radical backlash led Alexander to doubt future reforms, which inspired more radical backlash, a positive feedback loop of terrible that eventually led one radical group to assassinate the Great Reformer in 1881, only one year after TBK was fully published.
Questions for Discussion:
Given the above, how do you interpret characters like Dmitri and Ivan against the expectations of their “class”? Does this shed light on other characters, as well?
We mentioned a few weeks ago that Dostoevsky’s original plan for the novel was to focus on “present-day Russian children.” Here we are, 150 pages in, and we have our first real run-in with “present-day Russian children,” and they seem almost tangential to the plot. Note for new readers: they aren’t tangential at all, but why do you think D. would shift the central focus of his novel into such a late, seemingly arbitrary way?
Father Ferapont is a particular “type” in Russian culture and fiction (we discussed this a few weeks ago, as well). Clearly he’s something of a foil to Zosima, so how do you interpret this compare/contrast mechanism? In other words, what do you make of Ferapont?
Why is the title of this book “Lacerations”/”Strains”? And what do you make of Alyosha’s observation that the characters suffer from self-inflicted laceration/strain?
For Next Week:
Book 5 is shorter than some of our previous reads, but “The Grand Inquisitor” is without doubt the most difficult chapter in the book, both in terms of content and style. Garnett in particular tries to capture the archaic flavor of the language (and overshoots, I think), and P/V refuse to break Dostoevsky’s endless paragraphs (true to the original, but an eyesore) which, along with Ivan’s somewhat repetitive storytelling, can make the first time through more difficult than it needs to be.
So I’m open to splitting Book Five, unless you’re getting impatient with the pace. There’s more than enough material for us to discuss if we do split it, but I also know many of our readers have gotten ahead of the weekly readings and are probably tired of doubling back.
Please let me know your preference in the comments.
Characters Appearing in this Section:
(An asterisk indicates a newly introduced character who remains important later in the novel.)
- The Karamazov Family: Fyodor, Dmitri, Ivan, Alyosha
- their servants: Grigory and Marfa, Smerdiakov
- The monastery:
- Elder Zosima
- Father Ferapont,* an eccentric ascetic who sees demons
- Rakitin, the seminarian
- Other:
- Father Paissy, Father Iosef, the seminarian Porfiry
- a visiting monk from Obdorsk
- Prokhorovna, one of “the women” from Book 2; her missing son Vasily (Vassia/Vasenka)
- The Khokhlakovs (Hohlakov)
- Madame Khokhlakova
- Her daughter Lise
- Their servant, Yulia
- Doctor Herzenstube, who “can make nothing of it”
- The bizarre love triangle:
- Grushenka (Agrafena Alexandrovna)
- Katerina Ivanovna
- Foma, Dmitri’s friend and enabler
- The schoolboys*, including Smurov and Krasotkin
- The Snegiryov family*:
- The “Captain”, Nikolai Ilyich, aka “wisp of tow”/”whiskbroom”
- His wife, Arina Petrovna
- His daughter Varvara (the “too-clever” one)
- His daughter Nina (the “hunchback”)
- His son, Ilya, one of the schoolboys
Previous Entries in the Series:
- Announcement
- Introduction
- Book 1
- Book 2
- Book 3