Reading The Brothers Karamazov: Dostoevsky's Final Years
I couldn’t let this tour of the novel pass without a bit of history about it. This is mostly from Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time but some other sources were consulted too.
On June 8, 1880, Fyodor Dostoevsky stood before a crowd in Moscow and delivered the most celebrated speech of his life. The occasion was the unveiling of a monument to Alexander Pushkin, organized by the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature. The leading literary figures of Russia were present. The famous writer Ivan Turgenev spoke. Then Dostoevsky spoke.
Turgenev's remarks were more formal for the occasion. His words chosen carefully and cosmopolitan. Pushkin was great, he argued, but regional — not quite Shakespeare, not quite Goethe. It was a defensible reading. The audience applauded politely.
Then Dostoevsky got up.
He argued that Pushkin embodied something no other nation's literature had produced: vsemirnost — universal responsiveness. The capacity not merely to study other peoples but to inhabit them, to feel them from the inside. He cited the Spanish romances, the Scottish ballads, the Egyptian Nights.
This wasn't literary versatility. It was a spiritual gift. And it was distinctly Russian. Russia, precisely because it had suffered and wandered and been uprooted, had developed a capacity for universal sympathy that fractured Europe lacked. Russia was not behind Europe. Russia was destined to reconcile it.
People wept. They rushed the stage. Women threw flowers. Ivan Aksakov declared from the audience that it was a great historical event. Turgenev came forward and embraced his long-time rival. According to Frank, it was a full hour before the convention could continue. A contemporary critic wrote that the language of the speech "really looks like a sermon. He speaks with the tone of a prophet."
It was the public summit of his life. And the novel he had been writing for two years was not yet finished.
The speech didn't appear in a vacuum. Dostoevsky had spent years preparing the soil.
From 1876 through 1877 he published A Writer's Diary — a solo monthly journal in which he was author, editor, and publisher simultaneously. The format was deliberately loose: political commentary, memoir, literary criticism, and embedded short fiction. Two of his finest shorter works, “The Meek One” and “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” appeared there. Readers wrote to him constantly. About their doubts. Their crises. Their spiritual exhaustion. He sometimes responded publicly in subsequent issues. He became, in effect, a national confessor.
The Diary was also where he sharpened the ideas that would drive the novel. Patricide. The spiritual crisis of the intelligentsia. The question of whether secular virtue could sustain itself without God. All of it being worked out in public before it was dramatized in fiction. When the audience in Moscow heard him speak on Pushkin, they were hearing a voice that had been arriving in their homes monthly for years. That accumulated intimacy was part of what made the room weep.
He began the initial draft for The Brothers Karamazov in April 1878. In May, his three-year-old son Alyosha died of an epileptic seizure — a condition inherited from his father. The child had received from Dostoevsky the one thing Dostoevsky most feared passing on. He was devastated in a way that went beyond ordinary grief.
Weeks later he made a pilgrimage to the Optina Pustyn monastery with the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov. There he met the kind of elder — starets — who would become Father Zosima. He returned, Anna his wife later wrote, comforted. He began writing with renewed purpose.
The question of why a three-year-old suffers and dies is not an abstract theological puzzle. He had just lived it. That question — the suffering of innocent children, the unacceptable price of eternal harmony — became the burning center of the novel. Ivan's rebellion is not borrowed philosophy. It comes from somewhere specific.
He named the hero Alyosha. According to scholars, he based the character partly on Vladimir Solovyov — due to what must have been an extraordinary period of days at the monestary weeks after his son's death. Solovyov witnessed his grief at its rawest.
Solovyov was known for a generosity so literal that he gave away his own clothes to people in the street. Into Alyosha, Dostoevsky poured everything he most admired and most wished to believe was humanly possible — including, some critics argue, the qualities of Christ himself. The dead child became the fictional proof that goodness is real in this world. Grief transformed into theological argument.
The first installment appeared in The Russian Messenger dated February 1, 1879 and the novel ran month by month until November 1880. Readers followed it the way we follow mainstream television. They wrote to him to find out what was going to happen next. Each installment was greeted enthusiastically because, as with Crime and Punishment, the story is scandalous.
But Dostoevsky knew exactly what he was sending in. Frank notes that as Dostoevsky approached the sections containing "Rebellion" and "The Grand Inquisitor," "his life during this time was spent entirely tied to his desk, turning out chapter after chapter for his final masterpiece. To avoid misunderstanding that might lead to objections and perhaps censorship, each section sent to his editor Lyubimov was accompanied by a letter of explanation." (Frank, p. 788)
He had been burned before. A chapter in Notes from Underground had been cut by censors, its fundamental intent gutted. He was not going to let that happen to this. So he made Lyubimov a preemptive promise: the blasphemy would be offset in the following chapters on Zosima. The answer was coming. Trust him.
The editor accepted the arrangement. Ivan's blasphemous "poem" ran. And rather than suppressing the readership, it accelerated it. The Grand Inquisitor spread through educated Russian society like a philosophical scandal. People copied it out. The very sections Dostoevsky had defended in cover letters became the novel's most celebrated and enduring passages. Money talks. So does blasphemy, apparently. The Messenger could not print it fast enough.
What Dostoevsky intended by the Zosima sections he expressed with total clarity in a letter written during composition. He wanted to show that "a pure, ideal Christian is not an abstract matter but one graphically real, possible, standing before our eyes, and that Christianity is the only refuge of the Russian lands from its evils." (Frank, p. 792)
His ambition was total. His private fear was equally so. He wrote to friends that he was terrified he had not adequately answered Ivan's arguments. He was right to be terrified. Readers for 145 years have walked away from the novel haunted by Ivan, not consoled by Zosima. The antidote did not neutralize the poison. The poison was too good.
I am one of them, in fact.
Frank makes a theological observation that cuts through a lot of lazy categorization of Dostoevsky as a lock-step Orthodox believer. He writes that Dostoevsky "believed that Christ had appeared, not simply to promise resurrection and a triumph over death in some miraculously transformed Second Coming, but rather to point the way for humanity to accomplish the work of the resurrection itself." (Frank, p. 761)
This is not passive faith. This is a Christianity in which humanity has work to do. The resurrection isn't something that happens to us from outside. It's something we are called to enact, collectively, through love and active moral transformation in this world. Christ showed the way. The work remains. I don’t know if many Russians felt as Dostoevsky in this regard. I doubt it. But, nevertheless, it is the most grounded view of Christianity I’ve ever known.
Zosima's teaching — that each person is responsible for everyone and everything — is not just spiritual counsel. It's a program. It's Dostoevsky's most direct answer to Ivan. And is a form of spiritual humanism. Not the miraculous kind. Which makes Ivan's rebellion, in this light, not just a theological rejection but an abdication of some things that might be important.
In early August 1879, Dostoevsky made his fourth and final visit to Ems, a German resort known for its thermal waters and respiratory treatments. His doctors diagnosed early-stage pulmonary emphysema — manageable, they said, but not curable. They warned him against emotional stress, physical exertion, and smoking. He ignored all three. He was a lifelong heavy smoker. His daughter Lyuba later preserved a box of his tobacco with a handwritten inscription on it.
He was at the spa while the novel was running in serial. He was writing installments in the same period that he was receiving treatment for the lungs that would ultimately kill him. The novel and the dying were concurrent operations. It is bizarre to consider him entering a portion of the novel while residing at that supposed place of calm and healing.
By 1879 he was also a cultural celebrity in demand. Elected to the Academy of Sciences. Elected to the Slavic Benevolent Society. Invited to the honorary committee of the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale alongside Victor Hugo and Turgenev. Dinner invitations from high society and royalty. Young men hovering about him as a sage, wanting something from him he could barely articulate himself.
In a letter dated April 23, 1880 — two months before the Pushkin speech — he wrote: "They won't let me write... The Karamazovs are to blame again. So many people come to me daily, so many seek my acquaintance, invite me to their homes — that I am completely lost here and now I'm fleeing Petersburg."
He retreated when he could to the small resort town of Staraya Russa, near St. Petersburg, where he had settled with Anna and their children. Quieter. Less expensive than the German spas. It was there, primarily, that most of the novel was written.
Russia in 1880 was under enormous pressure. The revolutionary movement was accelerating — Tsar Alexander II would be assassinated the following year. The intelligentsia was fractured between Westernizers and Slavophiles. The Pushkin Festival was nominally about a poet but was really about the question of Russian identity: what Russia was, where it was going, whether it had anything worth offering the world.
Dostoevsky walked into the Pushkin Festival and offered not a political program but a spiritual synthesis. Russia wasn't behind Europe. Russia could contain Europe within a larger vision. That was flattering enough — or genuinely visionary enough, depending on your view — to reach across the usual battle lines. Slavophiles loved it. Even many Westernizers were moved. When Turgenev embraced Dostoevsky on that stage, the audience understood it as something larger than two old rivals making peace.
The Pushkin speech and its glorious acclaim (much of it was quoted in newspapers, of course) happened as Dostoevsky was still writing the novel chapter by chapter. When Dostoevsky gave the greatest public performance of his life and was hailed as a national prophet, several months of the novel were still unwritten.
Dostoevsky was a superstar. People wanted him at the best parties, he was a living cultural force (that left when he died), they admired him publicly, and they were reading his novel with wild abandon. Superstar.
A letter to Lyubimov dated August 10, 1880 — two months after the speech — shows him dispatching the ending of Book XI. That is Ivan's three conversations with Smerdyakov. The devil hallucination. The psychological annihilation of the most honest mind in the novel. The man who had just been cheered as a prophet in Moscow went back to his desk and wrote a man losing his mind.
Amidst public triumph and private labor, the speech claimed what the novel could not quite deliver. One told the crowd a problem had been solved. The other refused to pretend it had.
He sent in the Epilogue in November 1880. By all accounts, he was exhausted, exhilarated, and in such poor health that he died three months later.
The initial critical reception was not uniformly ecstatic. A review in Temple Bar contended the work would "add nothing to his reputation." The Spectator called it "disordered." But the popular reception was overwhelming. This was a sexually charged murder mystery. Readers had been following it for nearly two years. They already loved it. The critics were irrelevant.
He had also, during this period, been elected vice-president of the Slavic Benevolent Society. More dinners. More requests. More public appearances that wore him down while the lungs quietly continued their work.
On January 26, 1881, the Tsar's secret police executed a search warrant in the apartment of his neighbor Alexander Barannikov, searching for members of Narodnaya Volya — the organization that would assassinate Tsar Alexander II five weeks later. The stress of the search next door shook him.
The following day he suffered a pulmonary hemorrhage. Anna denied that the search had caused it. She said it happened after he dropped a pen-holder and bent to retrieve it. He suffered a second hemorrhage. She called the doctors. They gave a poor prognosis. A third hemorrhage followed.
Before he died he made one request. He asked that the parable of the Prodigal Son be read aloud to his children. Frank notes the profound weight of that choice. Of everything in all the books he had written, this was what he wanted his children to carry: transgression, repentance, the father running toward the returning son.
He died at 8:40 in the evening on January 28, 1881. He was 59 years old.
Forty thousand mourners attended his funeral. Tens of thousands lined the streets of St. Petersburg. He was buried at Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.
His tombstone bears the epigraph of The Brothers Karamazov. The same words that open the novel:
"Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." — John 12:24
The novel's epigraph became his epitaph. The man and the work sealed together, literally in stone.
He had planned a sequel. The Brothers Karamazov takes place 13 years in the past, for no apparent reason. This second novel was why. Alyosha was to be the central figure, grown into adulthood, the ideal Christian made manifest — the proof of concept he had promised Lyubimov, the answer to Ivan completed at last. None of it was written. The wheat fell into the ground.
Whether it brought forth much fruit — 145 years of readers would suggest it did. I find Dostoevsky’s life to be almost as interesting as his novels. And he put much of his life into his novels, various places, like all great writers. The mock execution depicted in The Idiot and the inclusion of Alyosha in the final novel, are two examples. He shared all of himself in his work and, ultimately, gave everything he could to his understanding of the power of our human love and forgiveness.
Dostoevsky is one of the finest things about being older and reading him. I know so much about the novel even if I am only now learning of the man himself. And I see it more richly with each subsequent reading. I won't stay away from it for long. There's so much more here that I have yet to think about.
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