Reading The Brothers Karamazov: Smerdyakov – Part Two
Ivan initially found Smerdyakov “very original" in his thinking and enjoyed discussion with him. He became accustomed to talking with the servant, discussed philosophical questions with him, including the light-on-the-first-day problem. But Ivan soon came to realize that Smerdyakov was not really seeking answers. "In any event a boundless vanity began to appear and betray itself, an injured vanity besides. Ivan Fyodorovich did not like that at all. Here his loathing began." (PV, page 426)
Boundless, injured vanity. These are Ivan's words, delivered as a diagnosis after the fact. They are probably the most penetrating observation about Smerdyakov's psychology in the entire novel — and Ivan is, in this instance, trustworthy. He is reading someone else. It costs him nothing to see it clearly.
Boundless means the vanity has no ceiling commensurate with his position. It is a claim on a scale completely incommensurate with everything the world has assigned him. The calfskin boots, the pomade, the frock coat brushed twice daily — these are not affectations. They are the visible form of an inward claim that has nowhere legitimate to go.
Injured means the claim has been in permanent collision with reality since birth. The name. Grigory's fist. Moscow, where the story of Stinking Lizaveta followed him. Every day in the Karamazov household is an injury to a vanity that believes it should not be there at all.
Dostoevsky introduces a piece of art here. Ivan Kramskoy was a contemporary Russian realist who painted The Contemplator, a semi-famous work, in 1876. It depicts a peasant standing alone in a winter forest, stopped on a road, staring at nothing in particular. Not thinking. Not praying. Just standing there, absorbed in something that has no name. The painting is not about a named person. It is about a type — the kind of figure who gets rendered as background, observed from outside, granted no interior life by the people who pass him on the road.
Kramskoy thought the peasant worth that quality of sustained attention. That is what the painting argues, without words. Dostoevsky invokes it here because he is making the same argument about Smerdyakov.
Consider the technique. The passage opens with external observation — a physiognomist studying the face, an analogy drawn to a painting. It has the grammar of distance. The narrator appears to be describing what someone else might notice from outside. But look at what the passage actually claims to know. It knows the impressions are dear to the contemplator. It knows he stores them greedily. It knows he doesn't understand why. It knows they stay hidden inside him even from himself. None of that is available to an outside observer. None of it can be read from a face. Dostoevsky has moved inside while maintaining the posture of standing outside, and the transition is so smooth that most readers do not notice it happened.
The method is analogy rather than direct assertion. He describes the type first — the peasant in the painting, the impressions dear to him, the possible outcomes of Jerusalem or arson. Then he applies the type to Smerdyakov: most likely he was such a contemplator, most likely he too was storing his impressions. The intimacy arrives through the comparison rather than through claimed access. Which means Dostoevsky never has to assert certainty about Smerdyakov's inner life directly. He establishes the template in the Kramskoy figure and lets the reader do the transfer. The narrator can maintain his stated distance — can keep the apologetic posture, can keep the most likely hedges — while having already delivered something far more intimate than any of that posture suggests.
This is the only moment prior to his final meetings with Ivan where Smerdyakov is granted the full weight of an interior life. The narrator has apologized for prominently mentioning him. The household treats him as furniture. Every peripheral mention has positioned him as context rather than subject. And then, inside what is framed as a digression, Dostoevsky stops and looks at him the way Kramskoy looked at the peasant — with the attention that insists a person is there, that something is accumulating behind the stillness, that the emptiness of the face is not the emptiness of the person.
The most likely is not just epistemic caution. It is structural cover. It allows Dostoevsky to make the move and then appear to take it back. The intimacy has already landed before the hedge arrives to qualify it. And the reader, like the reader of any good misdirection, has already absorbed what was delivered before the retreat.
The painting is not decoration. It is the thesis of the passage stated in visual terms. This person is worth looking at. Something is happening inside him. Dostoevsky hides him in plain sight — buries him in peripheral mentions, frames him as a cook and errand boy, a piece of furniture, has the narrator (absurdly as it turns out, a bit of humor actually) apologize for raising him at all — and then, inside what presents itself as a digression, stops and grants him the full interior weight of a human being. The misdirection and the revelation occupy the same passage simultaneously. That is the craft. And it is why the novel can be read multiple times before Smerdyakov comes into focus as the figure the entire structure is built around.
The guitar scene with Maria Kondratievna is the only moment in the early portion of the novel where Smerdyakov speaks freely about his own inner life. Alyosha finds it by accident, climbing the fence on his way somewhere else.
Smerdyakov is playing guitar and singing a sentimental song in a "lackey tenor, with a lackey trill." The song itself:
More than all a king's wealth Is my dear one's good health. Lord have me-e-e-ercy On her and me!
He is performing courtship — a small social theater for a woman who is clearly interested in him. So, for all his qualities, he can sing and play guitar and look good doing it. That is not a small detail. The performance has the same quality as everything else he does: surface management, careful presentation, the calfskin-boot psychology applied to romance.
But then this appears:
"I could have done even better, miss, and I'd know a lot more, if it wasn't for my destiny ever since childhood. I'd have killed a man in a duel with a pistol for calling me low-born, because I came from Stinking Lizaveta without a father, and they were shoving that in my face in Moscow, it spread there thanks to Grigory Vasilievich." (page 361)
The polished surface breaks. He is not speaking about duels and pride in the abstract. He is speaking about what it has cost him to carry his name through Moscow, out of an apparently spiteful act by Gregory. In this way the reader is led to believe that perhaps Smerdyakov is just in the story as a foil for Gregory. The word destiny is an interesting choice. It is the only word that fits what he is describing: a condition assigned at birth, carried everywhere, impossible to escape.
Then this: "In the year twelve there was a great invasion by the emperor Napoleon of France, the first, the father of the present one, and it would have been good if we had been subjected then by those same Frenchmen: an intelligent nation would have subjected a very stupid one, miss, and joined it to itself. There would be quite a different order of things then, miss." (page 361)
An extraordinary statement for a Russian peasant-servant in late 1870s. He wishes Russia had been conquered. His contempt for his country runs as deep as his contempt for the class system he exists inside. Both are organized around the same wound: he was born into this, he did not choose it, and it produced something in him that none of these people can see or use.
He adds: "The Russian people need thrashing, miss, as Fyodor Pavlovich rightly said yesterday, though he's a madman, he and all his children, miss." He has absorbed the patriarch's contempt for the people and extended it, with one additional step, to the patriarch's family. The household trained him on contempt. He has turned it back on the household.
And finally: "if I'm lucky I can open a café-restaurant in Moscow, on the Petrovka. Because I cook specialités, and no one in Moscow except foreigners can serve specialités."
He has a plan. A specific plan, a specific address, a specific vision of the life he wants to have instead of this one. The three thousand rubles he will eventually steal from behind the icons. Was it supposed to fund exactly this?
But before any of that, something else in this scene deserves attention. He has just finished singing. Maria praises the verse. He dismisses it immediately: "Verse is nonsense, miss. Consider for yourself: who on earth talks in rhymes?" He performed the song with apparent care, in front of someone who admires him, and then steps outside it entirely and calls it empty. This is the same instinct as the cat funerals and the dinner argument. He participates in the form and simultaneously observes its emptiness from outside. He cannot inhabit anything sincerely. Everything is surface. And he knows it — the knowing is itself part of the wound.
The word he uses is nonsense. It sounds like aesthetic judgment. It is something more than that. It is his entire relationship to meaning compressed into a single syllable. Verse is nonsense. The religion Grigory taught him is a system of customs and scripts. Russia would have been better off conquered. The household he serves is run by a madman and all his children. Nothing available to him carries genuine weight. He can see the emptiness of every form he inhabits, which makes him, in a strange way, the most clear-eyed person in the novel — and the most stranded. He has no form of his own to put in place of the ones he has seen through.
Then Maria observes that Smerdyakov respects Ivan Fyodorovich. His response is immediate and flat: "And he made reference to me that I'm a stinking lackey. He considers me as maybe rebelling, but he's mistaken, miss." He apparently harbored high hopes when Ivan began to converse with him. Now, he knows exactly how Ivan sees him. Not as an intellectual equal, not even as a curiosity worth sustaining. He has absorbed this assessment without flinching, and then adds the line that closes the scene's real argument: "if I had just so much in my pocket, I'd have left long ago."
And yet when he actually has the money in hand and no one knows it, he does nothing with it.
The soldier-martyr dinner scene is where the novel names its chapter after the saying: "Balaam's Ass Suddenly Spoke."
The table conversation starts with Grigory describing a newspaper account — a Russian soldier, captured by Asians, refuses under torture to renounce Christianity, is flayed alive, dies praising Christ. Fyodor Pavlovich responds with characteristic blasphemy: the soldier should be made a saint, his skin sent to a monastery to attract pilgrims and money. Grigory scowls.
Then: "Smerdyakov, who was standing at the door, suddenly grinned."
He has been standing at the door the whole time, in the customary peripheral position. Present, useful, unobserved. Then the grin.
What follows is a fully developed logical argument. If a man captured by enemies denies his faith under coercion, he sins. But at the moment of denial, he is immediately excommunicated — anathema — which means he is no longer a Christian. If he is no longer a Christian, he cannot be accused of renouncing Christianity, since he has nothing left to renounce. Therefore no sin was committed. The argument is nearly airtight within its own terms.
He does not stop there. "Consider for yourself, Grigory Vasilievich," he goes on, "in the Scriptures it is said that if you have faith even as little as the smallest seed and then say unto this mountain that it should go down into the sea, it would go, without the slightest delay, at your first order. Well, then, Grigory Vasilievich, if I'm an unbeliever, and you are such a believer that you're even constantly scolding me, then you, sir, try telling this mountain to go down, not into the sea (because it's far from here to the sea, sir), but even just into our stinking stream, the one beyond our garden, and you'll see for yourself right then that nothing will go down, sir." (page 217)
He has turned Scripture against the man who taught it to him. The weapon is exact — fashioned from the materials of the teacher's own faith. Grigory cannot move the mountain. Grigory has therefore admitted, without being able to say so, that his own belief is insufficient by Scripture's own standard. Dostoevsky adds the detail: Smerdyakov delivers this "conscious of his victory but being magnanimous, as it were, with the vanquished enemy."
The room's reactions are a close reading in themselves. Grigory is furious. Fyodor Pavlovich laughs hysterically. Alyosha is uncomfortable. Ivan Fyodorovich "listened quite seriously."
Ivan is the only one who recognizes what he is seeing. He does not laugh. He does not scold. Fyodor sees it too, from a different angle: "He's arranged all this for you," he confides in Ivan, "he wants you to praise him." The performance was not staged for the table. It was staged for Ivan alone. As is the whole meal Smerdyakov prepared with skill. The injured vanity that had found one person willing to engage with its questions is now doing what injured vanity does when it senses an audience that might finally confer recognition: it performs.
Like the meal itself, Smerdyakov’s unconventional approach to theology is meant to impress Ivan. Instead, it receives response that is the distant, analytic concurrence about popular faith — brief, accurate, nothing more. Ivan notes what he sees and moves on. He does not praise. He calls Smerdyakov a “lackey” afterward and tells Fyodor: "He's storing up his thoughts." The man being performed for has glanced at the performance, assessed it as third-rate, and looked away.
The Chermashnya gate conversation is where everything that has been distributed and concealed across the preceding sections finally crystallizes. The PV version of the chapter title is: "A Rather Obscure One for the Moment." Dostoevsky flags his method again.
Ivan walks toward the gate. He sees Smerdyakov sitting on the bench. The novel says:
"Ivan Fyodorovich realized at the first sight of him that the lackey Smerdyakov was also sitting in his soul, and that it was precisely this man that his soul could not bear." (page 425)
Not could not stand. Could not bear. The language is precise and insightful if faithful to the Russian. Something about Smerdyakov costs Ivan something to carry. It is loathing, but the loathing intensifies because the connection is real. Ivan recognizes something he cannot name, which I will discuss in a future essay.
The retrospective account in this same chapter clarifies what had happened between them. Ivan had found him "very original" at first. He had engaged. Then the injured vanity surfaced — the presumption of being in league with Ivan, the claim of shared understanding above the rest of the household — and Ivan found it repulsive. What he could not fully deny was that the claim was not entirely false, and he knew it. The loathing intensified precisely because the connection it was responding to was real.
By the time Smerdyakov sits on that bench, the dynamic has inverted completely. Ivan briefly reflected something back worth seeing. Ivan then turned away. A man with boundless injured vanity does not forget this. What follows is not admiration still seeking approval. It is something colder — a man who has decided that if Ivan will not recognize him as an equal, he will make Ivan his instrument instead.
He intends to walk past. He stops. He sits down. He cannot explain why.
Smerdyakov controls the timing with extraordinary precision. He waits. He lets Ivan settle into sitting. He waits for the exact moment Ivan swings forward to leave — and delivers his line precisely then: "My position, sir, is terrible, Ivan Fyodorovich, I don't even know how to help myself." Ivan sits back down.
What follows is the disclosure of the entire architecture: the signals Fyodor Pavlovich uses to identify who is at the door, the envelope with the three thousand rubles, Grigory's back treatment that will leave him unconscious, the epilepsy attack that may come tomorrow. Each item delivered with Smerdyakov's characteristic composure. He is not threatening. He is describing a situation, with apparent helplessness, that happens to be a set of conditions under which a murder could occur and Smerdyakov could not be blamed for it.
And then directly: "if your father was to die now, while none of that has happened, sir, then each one of you would get a sure forty thousand all at once."
Ivan asks directly whether Smerdyakov plans to sham the falling sickness. Smerdyakov gives an answer structured as a hypothetical: "Even if I could do such a thing, sir — that is, pretend, sir — and since for an experienced man it would be easy enough to do, then in that case, too, I would have every right to use such a means to save my life from death." He has confirmed it without confirming it. Ivan understands this. The conversation is over at this level, and both men know it.
Ultimately, after a discussion with his father, Ivan announces he is going to Chermashnya. Not Moscow. "He kept remembering it for a long time afterwards." He cannot explain why he says it. The novel marks the moment: "wondering afterwards why he had felt any need to tell this to Smerdyakov." Chermashnya is closer. Easier to summon back. The signal, which neither man will name as a signal, has been given.
The following morning, Smerdyakov straightens the rug as Ivan departs. Ivan says, "You see ... I'm going to Chermashnya ..." It escapes him involuntarily, "accompanied by a kind of nervous chuckle." Ivan is as surprised he says these words as anyone.
Smerdyakov replies: "So it's true what they say, that it's always interesting to talk with an intelligent man."
This line has appeared before as flattery and bait. Here it functions as something else entirely. The conspiracy has been ratified. Both men have understood what was agreed to without either having said it plainly. The reply is not praise. It is receipt.
The critical literature tends to locate Smerdyakov's motive in Ivan's philosophy. The "everything is permitted" argument removes the moral barrier. The murder follows from the philosophy. This reading is available, and Smerdyakov himself will offer a version of it later. But it is wrong about the sequence.
The motive was not created by Ivan Karamazov. It was created by Fyodor Pavlovich.
Hold the accumulation of these various passages simultaneously and ask what Fyodor Pavlovich is, specifically, to Smerdyakov.
He is the man who almost certainly fathered him on a half-mad wandering hag of a woman and found the whole thing amusing. Who gave him a surname derived from the insult attached to his dead mother. Who employs him as a cook and trusts him with the household's most sensitive secrets — the signals, the hiding place of the money — while never once acknowledging what he almost certainly knows: that this man serving him his coffee is his son. Who sits at the center of the household Smerdyakov has spent his entire life serving without belonging to it, surrounded by three acknowledged sons — all of them failing, all of them ruinous, all of them receiving whatever Fyodor Pavlovich has to give, however badly given. Who calls him Balaam's ass. Who, when Smerdyakov returned three hundred-ruble notes he had found in the mud — walked past them, picked them up, brought them inside — responded with brusque surprise: "Well, my lad, I've never seen the likes of you," and gave him ten rubles. The gesture is framed as generosity. It is the precise measure of what Fyodor Pavlovich considers this man worth: ten rubles for an act of honesty that most people would regard as ordinary decency, delivered with the tone of a man rewarding a dog. Who made him an adjective in front of guests.
Ivan's philosophy does not create this motive. Nor does it inspire anything specific that was not already present within Smerdyakov. Rather, it removes the last formal barrier between the motive and the act. The motive was already complete. It had been complete for years. Possibly decades.
The money confirms it. He tells Maria Kondratievna that if he had the money he would have already left — already opened the café-restaurant on the Petrovka. He later steals three thousand rubles and does nothing with it. Does not leave for anywhere. He sits in despair until he returns it to Ivan, placing it with The Homilies of Isaac the Syrian and handing it across like something he is glad to be rid of.
If the murder were primarily about escape and self-improvement, the money would have been used. It was not used. What the murder was about cannot be purchased or corrected by leaving for Moscow, because it is not a material condition. It is the specific, personal, intimate humiliation of this particular man, in this particular household — and that condition, in the logic available to someone with Smerdyakov's psychology, which Dostoevsky so brilliantly portrays, lies the answer.
The narrator apologized for this man early in the book. He was ashamed to distract the reader for too long on such ordinary lackeys. The household used him, hit him, named him after his mother's degradation, called him a speaking beast, considered him a lackey, and never once asked what was accumulating in the silence.
The reader does exactly the same thing.
When the murder comes, both the characters in the novel and the reader outside it are forced to confront the same fact: the motive was visible the entire time, distributed across dozens of small textual moments, hiding in plain sight behind a narrator's apology and the label of Balaam's ass.
Dmitri might have murdered his father anyway, given the weight of the plot. Perhaps Ivan wanted to murder him, too, at times. Alyosha was remarkably indifferent to the tensions. The fact Smerdyakov does it is his biography strangely brought to life in that premeditated but nevertheless spontaneous act of murder itself.
I am tempted to feel sorry for Smerdyakov. Certainly, his circumstances are tragic and he demonstrates certain worthy talents. He is a Moscow-trained specialty cook, can play “nonsense” verses on guitar, he is capable of deeper philosophical musings. And yet he is saddled with being the illegitimate son of a rather grotesque, outcast mother who died giving him birth. His father is likely Fyodor Karamazov but that basically has no more bearing on him than it does on the baffoonish father’s other three sons.
Empathy only goes so far. Because underneath it all, no matter how clever he is or how much of a dandy he might long to be, Smerdyakov is someone of “boundless injured vanity.” Vanity is present in us all to some extent, but injured vanity is nothing but festering resentment. Nothing worthy of empathy at all. And making it not only injured but “boundless” reflects an ego that might do anything even unto megalomania. And that is something we need not feel sorry for at all. It is, in fact, a catastrophe.
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