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Reading

Please read Volume I, Books One, Three, Five and Six carefully. Skim Book Eight in Volume II. Read carefully the short section entitled “The Devil: Ivan’s Nightmare” in Book Eleven of Volume II. Of course, you should feel free to read this wonderful book in its entirety if you have the time.

Questions to Consider

Book One

1. Can you provide an example of Dostoyevsky’s concern to paint human nature in all of its realistic complexity?

2. According to Dostoyevsky, why is it difficult to pin down the characteristics of many, especially clever, individuals?

3. What situations can cause people to turn mean, even if they are not naturally “ill-natured”? What does this tell you about Dostoyevsky’s method?

4. How does Dostoyevsky involve his readers in the evaluation of the realism of his characters?

5. How is Dostoyevsky able to portray goodness if he is so concerned with being true to human nature?

6. What kinds of realistic descriptions does Dostoyevsky go in for? What kind does he ignore? What does that tell you about his technique?

7. What does Dostoyevsky say about realism in his section on the “Elders”?

8. Why is a monastery not a safe refuge from the real world?

Book Three

9. How do we know that even sensualists like the elder Karamazov have a moral centre?

10. The character Grigory is simultaneously realistic and a type. What type is he and why is Dostoyevsky interested in portraying him?

11. Alyosha has much more potential as a spiritual person. What are his weaknesses?

12. How does Dmitry’s personality differ from that of Alyosha? Who do you think Karamazov identifies with more out of these two?

13. How does Dostoyevsky reveal his novel’s theme through Dmitry?

14. How does Dostoyevsky portray the workings of Dmitry’s heart? How effective is this technique?

15. How does Dostoyevsky get around the fact that Dmitry’s confessions to Alyosha are so rhetorical and somewhat artificial?

16. What is the significance of “The Confessions of an Ardent Heart”?

17. Who is Smerdyakov and what type does he portray?

18. The argument “Over the Brandy” brings the father and sons together in a religious debate. The debate highlights the different personalities, but also introduces a new important theme. What is it?

19. What does Ivan mean in “The Sensualists” where he says “One reptile will devour another reptile, and serve them both right!” What does that tell you about Ivan?

20. Did you discover anything interesting in Alyosha’s visit with Katerina? If so, what?

Book Five

21. What is the significance of Alyosha’s description of Krasorkin turning down money given in recompense for a beating from Dmitry (This is the person being described at the beginning of Book Five)?

22. In Book Five, we see Smerdyakov from a different angle, as another type of person that Dostoyevsky wants to criticize. What’s the type?

23. The section “The Brothers Get Acquainted” introduces us to Ivan. In what ways is Ivan redeemable? In what ways is he damned?

24. How does Ivan’s dilemma reflect the dilemma of all Russians, and of Western civilization?

25. What does Dostoyevsky say is a common solution of intellectuals to the breakdown of meaning in European life?

26. How is Ivan a rebel?

27. What does Dostoyevsky suggest is Ivan’s failing?

28. How is Ivan superior to his alter-ego Smerdyakov?

29. “The Grand Inquisitor” is the very heart of the novel. If you understand it, you can put the entire novel together. What is the story about?

30. What does the Grand Inquisitor say about the followers of Jesus or religious values?

31. What does the Grand Inquisitor have to say about religious faith and freedom?

32. What’s the relationship between freedom and happiness?

33. Why is the religion of Christ so wrong headed according to the Grand Inquisitor?

34. The Grand Inquisitor agrees that the big questions about the mystery of life are important. Why then does he decide to discount spiritual values and mysteries?

35. You may find the long discussion of miracles, mysteries and authority confusing. Dostoyevsky is playing with different definitions of religion here. In particular, he is suggesting that the religion of Christ was one that discounted the miraculous and the authoritative in order to allow individuals to freely chose the spiritual value of faith over miracles. The Inquisitor’s society is similar to the Orthodox Russian belief in rituals, spiritual authority and the miraculous. What is Dostoyevsky’s agenda do you think?

36. How do we know that the world created by the Grand Inquisitor is primarily a secular world?

37. What kind of secular society is Dostoyevsky predicting here? Do you see any parallels with more modern literature?

38. How does the Grand Inquisitor (i.e. Ivan Karamazov) justify taking away peoples’ freedoms?

39. Ivan reiterates the theme that Dostoyevsky returns to again and again in the novel. What happens when God and spirituality become irrelevant in society?

40. Ivan and Smerdyakov share a similar vice – pride in their own intellect. How does this pride differ? What other element in Smerdyakov’s pride does Dostoyevsky want to condemn?

41. In “Its Nice to Have a Chat with a Clever Man”, Dostoyevsky comments on the realistic description of the human mind. What does he say?

Book Six

42. The Elder Zossima (spelled differently in different English editions) is one of the least believable characters in the novel, because he’s primarily as spokesperson for Dostoyevsky’s religious beliefs. What is Zossima’s (Dostoyevsky’s) religious agenda.

43. What does Zossima say about the Bible that relates back to the first module on realism in Western culture?

44. How did Zossima develop his spiritual personality?

45. What for Zossima is the true failure of materialism and materialist philosophies?

46. What does Zossima have to say to those who put their faith in science and reason alone?

47. What does Zossima have to say about equality? Do you agree with any part of his argument?

48. What does Zossima have to say to those who find his schemes for spiritual brotherhood fantastical?

49. What’s Zossima’s problem with modern science?

50. Why does Zossima (i.e. Dmitry and Dostoyevsky) think that sensuality can be spiritually useful?

51. Does Zossima believe in hell or the devil?

Book Eight

52. How is the style of Volume II different from that of Volume I?

53. In Book Eight, we go more deeply into Dmitry’s (or Mitya in slang) mental battleground. How do we know that Dmitry will eventually be redeemed in spite of all the holes he is digging himself into?

54. Dostoyevsky plays with the concept of realism in his character Dmitry. How?

55. How does the novelist reveal the inner torment of Dmitry?

Book Eleven

The Devil: Ivan’s Nightmare

56. Is the devil in Ivan’s nightmare real? Is he realistic?

57. Why does the devil call himself an anti-materialist realist?

58. How does Dostoyevsky show us that Ivan is really dreaming up the devil (and wrestling with his own inner demons here)? What does that signify?

59. When Dostoyevsky writes “You’re me with a different face,” what psychological concept is he affirming.

60. What does the devil have to say about earthly realism?

61. How did the devil catch a cold? What’s the significance of this account of cold-catching?

62. What does the devil suggest that his function is?

63. How has the spiritual world been impoverished by science?

64. What have humanistic philosophy and science done to ethics?

65. Why does the Devil think that the atheist (Ivan) and the religious fanatic have a lot in common?

66. What happens to man when God and religion are dethroned from their realm?

67. Why is the human perspective inherently problematic?

Suggested or Possible Answers

1. Despite the fact that his novel is about the battle between good and evil, Dostoyevsky tells his readers that “evil-doers” are not simply villains but “are much more naïve and artless than we generally assume. As, indeed, we are ourselves.”

2. People like to “dissemble” – to fool you or surprise you.” That’s why drawing realistic characters is so difficult. The realistic writer needs to be able to show such traits “characteristic of a great many people, some of them very clever people, too, and not only of a man like Karamazov.”

3. Sometimes people can turn “mean” and “tyrannical” through “sheer idleness” as in the case of the widow of General Vorkhov. Dostoyevsky clearly does not want to pain people in terms o black and white despite the fact that his novel is about good and evil. He’s a psychological realist.

4. The author often involves his readers directly, by asking questions about whether or not his characters match their own experience

5. In the section on “The Third Son Alyosha”, Dostoyevsky is careful to show his character as someone who clearly loves humanity and has chosen the “light of love” over “worldly wickedness.” Although his nature is special, he’s neither naïve nor a simpleton. At the same time, he allows us to see that this is “precocious”; Alyosha is like an innocent child who has been protected from the real world by his elder (monk guru) and the monastery. He clearly needs to test his goodness in the cauldron of the complexities of real life.

6. Dostoyevsky will describe the faces of his characters minutely, as for example in his description of the elder Karamazov’s “fleshy bags under his little eyes” and “long, cruel and sensual mouth.” He also describes the immediate settings within which these characters operate – rooms. The technique he uses is that of the dramatist who is interested in the exploration of characters in small-scale settings. Dostoyevsky will never tell us anything about the natural environment or even the urban physical environment in which these characters play roles and reveal their souls.

7. He suggests that scientific realists are dogmatic people who would deny the existence of miracles even if faced with them as “an undeniable fact”. He says that a religious person like Alyosha is more of a true realist than these skeptics and unbelievers. Thus, Dostoyevsky counters the realistic movements of his day.

8. Although monasteries have been places for spiritual regeneration for centuries, they can also be places where people go to feel that they are superior to others. If people embrace religion out of pride, says Dostoyevsky, they are not freeing, but enslaving themselves.

9. The elder Karamazov, when drunk, feels “irrational terror and moral shock”. He wants someone who is not “licentious” around him at those times. He also wants someone who won’t reproach him about the possibility of punishment “either in this world or the next.”

10. Grigory is a bible thumping and dogmatically religious person. Although he has some genuine spirituality, he doesn’t really understand religion and his spiritual centre is fairly hollow. His religion is one of pride, whereas Alyosha comes to religion naturally. Dostoyevsky wants to see spiritual values reconnected with real life, but he’s aware that many people who embrace religion do so for the wrong, or partial, reasons.

11. He really doesn’t know anything about life and love in the real world. He’s afraid of women that he’s attracted to and his own sexuality.

12. He’s sensual, impulse and he embraces love and life and all aspects of human nature. At the same time, he knows that there should be something more than being a force of nature. An insect is a force of nature, but far less honourable than a man. Also, Dmitry knows that human life is tragic and should be about more than drinking and whoring. He feels the need to reform, and moments of “shame and disgrace” for being “an insect God has endowed with lust.”

13. Dmitry says of earthly life and worldly desires: “There God and the devil are fighting for mastery, and the battlefield is the heart of man.”

14. Dmitry reveals his heart to Alyosha. The technique is highly rhetorical and resembles that of a dramatist. Most authors today would shun this technique in order to explore the mind of a character totally internally and without reference to other characters. Dostoyevsky did explore the latter in Notes from the Underground but when he wanted to write a more serious novel, he went for more classical devices for portraying psychological reality.

15. Dmitry says “Indeed I can’t help feeling that in telling you about all these inner struggles of mine, I’ve exaggerated a little in order to show you what a fine fellow I am. But, all right, let it be like that and to hell with all those who pry into the human heart!” The dramatic and rhetorical techniques deployed by Dostoyevsky in his novels allow him to emphasize the tragic elements in his novel, but they separate him from more modern psychological realists, who would see these devices as getting in the way of a realistic exploration of their characters’ minds.

16. It is here that we see an important theme of the novel working itself out. Dmitry is an “ardent heart” with “free will”. Because humans have free will and are sensual beings, they can get trapped up in their own desires. The battle occurs because people like Dmitry also have a sense of morality and rectitude and berate themselves for going overboard with respect to their “base” and “low passions”. Dmitry even feels murder in his heart for his father, who has come between him and the woman that he lusts for. In order to be reformed, Dmitry has to let go of his anger and violence and turn his lust into love.

17. Smerdyakov, the servant who will eventually kill the elder Karamazov, is the instrument of the desires of the three brothers. He is cold, calculating and cynical. Whereas Grigory’s attachment to religion is prideful, Smerdyakov’s rejection of religion is equally prideful. The former literally believes in every miracle mentioned in the Bible; the latter thinks that miracles are nonsense. He thinks he’s an intellect, but he has nowhere near the brain of Ivan Karamazov. Dostoyevsky goes into the brain of Smerdyakov to show how reason and logic can be misused.

18. As the argument develops, Dostoyevsky makes the point that, if someone believes neither in God nor the afterlife, there is no reason for them to have ethics. In effect, without religion, “all is permitted.” A corollary of this is the belief in evil or the devil. A world without religion is a world where good and evil. Dostoyevsky warned of this consequence. Nietzsche would later build on this insight to advocate a new morality that would be beyond good and evil.

19. He’s hinting at the fact that Dmitry will murder his father. Because both Dmitry and his father are sensualists (the former redeemable, the latter incorrigible), Ivan regards them as inferior to himself with his intellect. This smugness shows a high degree of coldness and pride in his intellect. However, Ivan is still redeemable, unlike his alter ego Smerdyakov.

20. The description of Katerina’s room is laid out in realistic detail, right down to the “two unfinished cups of chocolate, cakes, a porcelain saucer with blue raisins, and another with sweets.” Katerina’s face is equally realistically described, including the “lines of her exquisite lips.” In terms of the exploration of Katerina’s character, Dostoyevsky is brilliant at showing how Katerina is self-deluded and willfull, despite at first appearing to be a selfless woman in love.

21. This is a brilliant dissection of human emotions. Although Snegiryov needed the money badly, he also wanted to maintain his honour and reject an offer that was made out of charity. Alyosha tells us that these kinds of emotions are natural. Dostoyevsky pats himself on the back as a psychological realist by having Lize (Lise in some books) tell Alyosha that he has an uncanny ability to “see into people’s minds” and “analyze souls”.

22. You may not know this but Smerdyakov is being described as a particular kind of rationalist-realist that Dostoyevsky despises – a utilitarian who believes in facts so much that he ignores the higher realities of faith and the imagination. The utilitarians wanted to re-organize Western society along entirely rational and self-interested principles. Dostoyevsky wants to show that these people are prideful, limited in vision, and envious of their betters (i.e. aristocrats).

23. Ivan set out with the will to “live and love life” even if it appears to be contrary to logic and reason. His original affirmation of life and his genuine affection for humanity ennoble him. But he is too logical and too willing to dismiss faith. As a result he is inclined to give up on life and love. Ivan is a potential suicide because he won’t accept life on its own terms.

24. Dostoyevsky suggests that the big eternal questions about God and morality are all that the new Russia can talk about. Russians found themselves confronted with a European civilization that was beginning to go into a crisis. Dostoyevsky suggests that European thinkers could no longer deal with practical problems because they were worried about the loss of meaning in a secular society.

25. Many of these individuals, people like Ivan, embrace socialism or anarchism as kinds of heaven on earth.

26. Ivan rejects the world as it is, and the Christian faith that supports people in a world of suffering. He wants to eliminate suffering, especially the unnecessary suffering of children. He’s not willing to wait for God or heaven to decide who is good and who is not. He wants to reform earth. Moreover, he wants to reform men and women, who often act more like wild beasts than rational creatures. In order to fix the sufferings of the world, and in order to create a just and harmonious society, Ivan is willing to deny people their individuality and free will.

27. He begins from a position of compassion for suffering humanity, but at the end of the day, he’s succumbed to a desire to organize the world in the image of his own logic and to fulfill his pride in his own superior understanding. He has lost any semblance of Christian forgiveness in his egoism and his desire for revenge against all those who have caused suffering.

28. Smerdyakov never loved humanity and his intelligence is superficial. Ivan began his life with all the best motives, but gradually became cynical and logical. Unlike Smerdyakov, Ivan knows that he does not understand everything and that human logic is a limited way of understanding life. But, at the end of the day, Ivan “made up his mind to stick to the facts” as an act of rebellion against God.

29. Ostensibly, the story takes places during the Spanish Inquisition in the fifteen-hundreds when the Inquisitors burned witches and heretics at the stake to perverse a united and harmonious Catholic society. But the story could equally be about any logically and rationally ordered (i.e. socialist) country that suppressed individualism and free will. Into this suffering society, Jesus Christ comes for a second time to promote a return to spiritual values. The people begin to worship him and kiss his feet. He causes a commotion. Eventually, he is arrested and brought before the Grand Inquisitor, who recognizes him as the Son of God, but rejects him as irrelevant to the new and modern world that is being created. In “The Grand Inquisitor”, Ivan elaborates on his rebellion from God and a religion that places more emphasis on personal spiritual growth than earthly happiness.

30. He suggests that religious values will never change reality. The people who worship Jesus one day, will sell him out the next. People don’t operate according to spiritual values.

31. He says that religious freedom has been used to justify injustice, wars, and all kinds of fanaticism. He argues that human happiness will only be possible when free will and religious freedom are “vanquished”.

32. Freedom does not make people happy. An orderly society where people are forced to behave decently towards one another is what makes for happiness. The way to make people happy, and to eliminate as much suffering as possible, is to cater to their material wants.

33. It places an emphasis on suffering, forgiveness and the life to come. That’s a recipe for breaking people’s hearts. The spiritual bread from heaven is not as important as providing real bread to get rid of hunger and starvation.

34. The freedom to explore spiritual values just leaves people more tormented at the end of the day. Hardly anyone has the strength to achieve a spiritual identity on their own.

35. Dostoyevsky is talking to his fellow Russians here. He wants to encourage a religious revival, but one that is based upon faith and free will rather than the superstitions of Russian peasants or the program of the Russian Orthodox Church for the control of the hearts of the Russian people. While Dostoyevsky deplores the dethroning of religious values by scientific and secular culture, therefore, he does not advocate a return to a tradition that denies individuals their spiritual freedom. This argument inside an argument can be confusing, since Dostoyevsky more typically associates the Grand Inquisitor with a socialist secular society. See the next question.

36. The Grand Inquisitor tells Christ that the secret to universal unity and happiness, is privileging earthly reality over spiritual values. Only by working with reality can one create a unified, harmonious, rational and peaceful society that limits human suffering to a minimum. The Grand Inquisitor says “We shall give them quiet, humble happiness, the happiness of weak creatures, such as they were created.”

37. He is foreshadowing a highly bureaucratic, centrally controlled society. The obvious parallel is Big Brother in George Orwell’s novel 1984.

38. He points to the elimination of suffering, particularly among children. He suggests that he has corrected your work or improved the lives of the meek that Jesus first came to save. He believes that the loss of freedom is a small price to pay the decrease in human suffering. Social control is justified by the love for humanity.

39. “Everything is permitted.” Obviously, that means that crime or immorality is permitted. But in a deeper sense, on the personal level it means that suicide is permitted, and on the social level, it means that immoral means can be used to achieve good ends (i.e. depriving individuals of their freedom).

40. In Smerdyakov, it has grown into “quite an inordinate vanity”. Ivan is disgusted by this characteristic. He is also revulsed by the “peculiar and revolting familiarity” of Smerdyakov. In Smerdyakov, Dostoyevsky criticizes the tendency of a modern secular society to level the social classes. Smerdyakov is only a servant, but he thinks that his cleverness puts him on the level of his masters.

41. He tells us that, when people are excited or worried, their thoughts are “not really thoughts, but something very vague.” These thoughts are related to “all sorts of strange and almost unexpected desires.” Long before Freud, it appears, Dostoyevsky was describing the human subconsciousness.

42. Zossima wants to bring Russians and Europeans back to Christianity. His faith is in the common people, and their common sense, rather than the upper classes who have been tainted by scientific and rationalistic thinking. That, of course, doesn’t mean that Dostoyevsky approves of everything in peasant religion. He especially dislikes the emphasis on miracles and mysteries.

43. He points out that the Bible is one of the best places to find realistic descriptions of true individuals like Joseph, Esther, Vashti or Jonah.

44. He had to go through a probationary period as a soldier first, says Dostoyevsky, and only when he realized the suffering that he was causing to his fellow man did he begin to move to a new level of consciousness.

45. Materialism (and science) are limited to the senses and materialistic values make people the slaves of their own most base desires. Once materialism replaces spiritual values, men and women’s desires begin to multiply, without any hope of ever being satisfied. The spiritual domain, on the other hand, speaks directly to man as a higher and nobler being.

46. A society based on reason alone is an immoral society. Only spiritual values can prevent people from committing immoral actions. In a society based on science and reason, crime will grow, violence will become more common, and nations will destroy one another – because people are no longer subject to God.

47. True equality will never exist in earthly society, since there will always be masters and servants, rich and poor, winners and losers. The only true equality is found on a spiritual level – where everyone has dignity and the bonds between people can be established. Without spiritual equality, there will be constant envy, rebellion and revolution.

48. He suggests that their alternatives for a rationally ordered society are even more foolish and will only end up in violence.

49. Science is a prideful activity that assumes everything is knowable. It takes the mystery out of our lives. It destroys our intuitive sense of unity with the world and with other possible worlds. By basing everything of facts and reason, it destroys our ability to have faith and hope.

50. Loving the earth and its gifts is fine. Unlike scientific reason, these at least are life affirming. But we need to look upon them as “gifts” from God rather than as something to control or dominate.

51. He considers hell to be the spiritual agony of the mind divorced from its spiritual roots. In that sense, Dmitry, Ivan, and Alyosha are sometimes in hell during their progress and redemption in the novel. Clearly, Dostoyevsky is not advocating traditional religion here.

52. In Volume II, the plot or story line dominates. This allows you to see Dotoyevsky as a different kind of writer – one who knows how to tell a story full of rich characters.

53. Dostoyevsky tells us that Dmitry craves “renewal and regeneration”. Dmitry knows himself to be something higher than the insect that he describes himself as being. He also suggests that his love for Grushenka might be something more than “a carnal passion.” We also learn that the excesses of his appetites obscure a person who is “a very naïve, child-like person.”

54. Dmitry successively refers to 1) conflicts, 2) mathematics, 3) the soap opera events of his life as examples of realism. He also suggests that he has no literary talent for expressing realism. Dostoyevsky’s pun here is that none of these so-called realisms are critical. The most important reality is going on in Dmitry’s mind and cannot be reduced to any number of axioms or facts.

55. In the section entitled “A Sudden Resolution”, we see Dmitry fresh from his attack on Grigory. In order to more realistically portray the confusion in Dmitry’s mind, Dostoyevsky has him speaking in brief phrases (punctuated by …) that often make no sense to the others around him. He is a mixture of excitement, sadness, exhilaration and is subject to wild mood swings. His personal agitation contributes to and reinforces the plot, which is rushing to a climax – both with respect to Dmitry’s crisis and the murder of his father.

56. The devil is a hallucination. He is actually a part of Ivan’s own mind, a product of his subconsciousness. But what is interesting about the devil is that he is so realistically drawn – not as the creature of fire and brimstone – but as an elegant gentleman a little behind the times. Why behind the times? Because the devil is out of fashion in the modern world.

57. On the one hand, he’s clearly anti-materialist as a purely symbolic, fantastical creature who represents good and evil in human life. On the other hand, he’s very realistic about his role. Without God, he doesn’t exist. If the earthly world doesn’t believe in him, then he won’t exist in another world either.

58. He writes of Ivan: “In actual fact, it is I myself and not you who says all that!” What is fascinating here is that heaven and hell, spiritual and physical, all exist in the mind. For Dostoyevsky, the mind is the ultimate reality.

59. He’s commenting on the divided self which allows an individuals to have rational and emotional selves that can come into conflict if unbalanced, which is what has happened in Ivan’s case.

60. He claims to appreciate it “so much” because everything in the realistic-rationalistic world of science is precise, quantifiable, and axiomatic. In the spiritual realm, he argues, “everything is an indeterminate equation.”

61. He assumed human form while traveling through the chilly reaches of outer space to attend a diplomatic reception. Ivan suggests that the devil mixes his supernatural nature with human realism here only in order to make himself more believable.

62. The devil’s function is to complete the yin and yang of life, to allow for negation. Without the possibility of criticism or negation, he says, life would be boring. This need for negation also explains the importance of suffering in human life. Without suffering and death, life would be extremely boring and uninteresting.

63. The devil suggests that science has so atomized, quantified and explained everything, that the spiritual domain has become silly. The devils in hell “all had our tails between our legs.”

64. They’ve made morality irrelevant or problematic. For those without much of a conscience, they’ve made it possible to be immoral. For those who still have a conscience, they’ve made it more difficult to know what is right or wrong and thereby left people with far more guilt than ever before.

65. Both are mentally sophisticated and unhinged – “there are moments when it looks as if the fellow is within a hair’s breadth of plunging head over heels into the abyss.”

66. Man is exalted to the same extent as God is dethroned. It is the era of the “man-god” who dominates over nature and controls all things by his will. The problem here of course is that man will not ever be able to create a plan or system for making the world fit his titanic pride. Man will “jump without scruple” over all the ethical barriers that have existed for so many centuries. The probable result will be a struggle for domination in which the only rule will be “everything is permitted”.

67. It is a particular, rather than a universal perspective. It provides no overarching framework for contemplating one’s existence or the meaning of one’s life. As Dostoyevsky says:

    “Wherever I stand thereby becomes the most important spot… So everything is permitted and that’s all there is to it! But if you have made up your mind to break the rules, why do you still need the stamp of righteousness?”