Cherisa’s Comments (group member since Sep 26, 2021)

Cherisa’s comments from the The Obscure Reading Group group.

Ken wrote: "...the narrative has a real soap opera-like feel to it..."

I know, the drama is way over the top, like a bad reality show where you can't decide whether real people are that stupid or just mugging for the cameras. It makes it hard to get through these chapters, but what is the purpose of the structure? For instance, why "three ordeals" of the investigation? Is that like the three denials of Peter, or the three days Jesus was in the tomb, something else, maybe just meaningless? Was Dostoevsky being paid by the page and threw in a bunch of hullabaloo just to earn more? Any one got any ideas? Otherwise a lot of this is a big shrug for me just to hurry and get past.

What's well-established in these pages though is that Dmitri is more like his father than any of the other brothers, the same manic passions and selfishness, (and Ken, you're right, it's not love though he calls it that), but without the drive or ambition to do something, to earn a living or make his own way with purpose.

Ken wrote: "Which reminds us that Zosima kept stressing the importance of joy -- giving it, spreading it, etc. How refreshing."

That's a good reminder, Ken. And Zossima I think does represent the Church that should have been, actual goodness even if his corpse corrupted so quickly and inconveniently. It cracks me up how Madame Hohlakov questions "such conduct" of a man with regards to "letting" his dead body stink so quickly (in her note to Rakitin who tells Alyosha). But in a sense I think that Dostoevsky is using the "smell of corruption" of Zossima's body as a metaphor - being a leader of the Church, no matter how saintlike one is, is going to put its stink on you.

The passage on the first miracle at Cana is one of my favorites in all Russian lit, the way Dostoevsky reminds us that Jesus intervened at his mother’s behest for gladness, not illness or death (for instance). This opposes so much else that has happened - the arguments about the three temptations of Satan in the desert, the lack of a miracle at Zossima’s passing. It’s also an antidote to the Grand Inquisitor. The Church could have chosen to support people’s happiness. Instead, it created fear that forces them to find false security in the Church. What might have been is so bittersweet here.

Darrin wrote: "I still can't help thinking that Ivan's critique is the author speaking and that Ivan's desire for a world where children no longer suffer reflects Dostoevsky's loss of his son Alyosha to epilepsy...."

Darrin, I agree, of all the brothers, Ivan speaks for the author, and his personal fingerprints about pain and hurt are all over the book. Miracles won't make up for them, and so religion is no solace.

Scapegoats are an ancient idea, that one sacrificial lamb can redeem a whole group. But why isn't it ever the most powerful, not the most vulnerable, who gets put up on the block? Would Ivan say okay if eternal harmony came at the expense of misery for the Grand Inquisitor?

P.S. Darrin, I love Murakami.

Of all the books I've read, I could probably only name two chapters out of all of them by name, Riddles in the Dark, when Bilbo acquires the One Ring, and The Grand Inquisitor, when the Church's main enforcer arrests Jesus who has inconveniently for said Church returned to walk the earth again.

We know that Ivan wants a worldview he can believe in, but this chapter makes it clear that religion won't answer his need, and Dostoevsky indicts the power structure of the Church. The irony and hypocrisy of the Church, the arrest of the man who is its raison d'etre for his challenge to its power, the cynicism of not helping people live to the ideals of Christ but of securing their docility and submission for security in the now, prevents this outlet to Ivan's search.

I just love how Dostoevsky flips the Judas kiss metaphor here in similar fashion to making Satan in our image in the prior chapter Rebellion. Here instead of Judas kissing Christ to seal his betrayal, Jesus kisses the Grand Inquisitor to forgive him of his betrayal of Christian teaching.

Rebellion
Our catechism teaches us that man is created in God's image. But there is a thread in European intellectual history against the dominance of religion and about God not existing. The "three imposters" treatise (The Spirit of Spinoza) for instance called the Abrahamic religions of Moses, Jesus and Muhammed hoaxes. Voltaire wrote that if God did not exist, man would have needed to invent him. Bakunin wrote that if God did really exist, it would be necessary for man to abolish him. (Everyone had agendas.) Discussion of God's reality and what it means to man's goodness and society is wide and deep.

And then Dostoyevsky comes along and flips all that over, saying if Satan doesn't exist and man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness. Don't look at our goodness to know who we are as people, look at the evil we do, the pain we inflict on each other. And it is this nature that Ivan can't square with in the Rebellion chapter. Our invention of Satan, not God, reflects our own nature. The long litany of examples in the chapter of the "national past time of inflicting pain" (the horse beaten to death by a peasant, the daughter locked in a shed covered in excrement, the boy mauled by dogs for throwing a stone) leads Ivan to tell Alyosha that without such cruelty, man could neither exist on earth nor known good and evil. None of those who perpetrate the pain suffer from their acts. Ivan wants a world where he can see the promises that religion makes - that the lion will lie down with the lamb, that the victim will rise up and embrace his murderer. He wants justice now, not in some afterlife where it won't matter. But what he knows he wants the most is a world where children don't suffer. For that he'll forego eternal harmony. The price is too high.

Back to evil and the invention of religions, Ivan then asks "What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured?" Even if offered a ticket to heaven, he says he would return it. This is his "rebellion," that creation of a world requiring the torture to death of only one child, one baby, would not be worth it.

This is a crucial part of TBK, and of course carries into the next chapter, one of the most famous in all literature.

P.S. I'm not an expert, but merely opining on what I think is central to the chapter. Argue with me! :)

There is more socialism-bashing, this time by Father Paissy. After Father Zossima tells Alyosha he'll speak his last words to him, Father Paissy leaves the cell with Alyosha and tells him "...even those who have renounced Christianity and attacked it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardour of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ of old. When it has been attempted, the result has only been grotesque." This was well before the Bolsheviks and Stalin, kangaroo courts and gulags....

Dostoyevsky does a lot of signaling about what's coming later, and he's not subtle about it. Two examples are the "one child" and Alyosha taking on the sins of his brothers. "A Meeting with the Schoolboys" has Alyosha see a group of six boys ganging up on a solo boy (one child-signal of Ivan's), throwing rocks at each other. The boy attacks Alyosha once that fight is over (signal of taking on Dmitri's sin against the boy's father), and our Christ-like figure merely asks serenely "How have I wronged you?' Later at Madame Hohlakov's, in the face of all the ladies' drama and hysteria, he's supposedly the only authentic one present, stating baldly "I really don't know how I dare say this, but somebody must tell the truth... for nobody here will tell the truth" (when he tells Katerina Ivanovna that she loves Ivan even though she says she loves Dmitri). Alyosha even accuses Ivan of lying (speaking unjustly, wrongly) when he announces he's leaving Katerina and won't be her "laceration." The mixing up of sins and guilt and who gets punished is so Russian.

Rebellion and The Grand Inquisitor deserve their own posts.

Darrin wrote: "At this point, and forgive me because this is not directly related to The Brothers Karamazov but is related to people having real discussions about things that matter. Basically I want to recommend..."

This sounds really good, Darrin. But you get no thanks from me for adding Book #328 to my TBR. :)

Maybe we have lost the art of deep conversing if we ever had it at all. Reading does a lot for us that we don’t necessarily have IRL, not just what we might have had in our salad days. Traveling back to tsarist Russia to listen to deep conversations is certainly one example.

Darrin wrote: "Something else that occurred to me as I was reading the conversation between Ivan and Father Zosima and the other monks in Book II, Chapter 5, which, in my edition, is translated as So Be It! So Be..."

Darrin, this is a really good point. In the Elders chapter, the talk about socialism is prescient. "For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question... the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to Heaven from earth but to set up Heaven on earth."

What grabs me right from the start is how quickly and how deeply conversations go in Dostoyevsky. No hemming and hawing and wells and all rights. I don't know how real that is, did people ever really talk like this? But my gawd, could you imagine participating in such conversations with your friends and new acquaintances today? Not just talk about the weather or latest tik tok meme, but how to live our lives, what we're doing, whether we love humanity....

This section cracks me up because we still have these type of people today:
"The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular" or "the more I detest men individually, the more ardent my love for humanity." (A Lady of Little Faith). This is just a step away from today's Yes yes, I want to be a good person and make the country better, but get all "those people" away from me!

I would like to recommend reading up on the three temptations of Christ (bread, miracle, power) before the chapters Rebellion and The Grand Inquisitor (Part 2, Book V, Chapters IV and V). It’s a good grounding to follow Ivan’s really important conversation with Alyosha, and pretty crucial to Dostoevsky’s purpose for the book, IMO.

This is perfect. I haven’t read it in probably 30 years and want to get back to it.