PERSONAL ANALYSIS OF THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
I have chosen to analyze this book from the historical and psychoanalytical perspective.
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
When the book was first published in 1880, serfdom had just recently been abolished. Russia was still reeling from the tragic Crimean War and the Polish Rebellion of 1863. Tsar Alexander II had instituted, for the first time, Western European legal principles and established equality before the law, impartial hearings, uniform procedures, judicial independence, and trial by jury. Alexander II, the "Gentle Tsar", was implementing much reform as well as a great deal of passive repression. It was probably one of the most tumultuous times in modern Russian history, third only to the Revolutions of 1903 and 1917. The main characters of The Brothers Karamazov represent this conflict of old, new, and idealized. Alyosha is the epitome of the Russian ideal: holy, persevering, and forgiving. Dmitri represents the true Russia: drunk, carefree, and passionate. Ivan is the invasion of Western thought and customs: rational, intellectual, and cynical.
PSYCHOANALYTICAL PERSPECTIVE Dostoevsky is often accalaimed as the most intuitive pre-Freud analyst of human psychology, and The Brothers Karamazov is the height of his works on psychology. It deals with guilt, empathy, faith, cynicism, debauchery, morality, maturity, sexuality, love, hate, self-torture and criminality-- each scrutinized in extreme detail and accuracy. In the book we meet a Russian family: a corrupt father and the four sons he produced. The eldest, Dmitri, represents the flesh; the second, Ivan, represents the intellect; the third, Alyosha, represents the spiritual; and the fourth, Smerdyakov, represents "the insulted and injured, the dispossessed." These characters becomes enmeshed in a web of moral philosophy from which none escape. The characters are all involved in the murder of their lecherous father, and as the book continues they reveal their emotions, conscious and subconscious, with horrible clarity. Can Alyosha retain his innocent faith and love of humanity in the face of immorality, murder, faithlessness, and disillusionment? Can Ivan truly reason and intellectualize his way out of the conflict raging in his soul? Can Dmitri overcome his deviancy and carelessness and tke responsibility for a lifetime of the pleasures of the flesh? Did Smerdyakov truly justify to himself the murder of his father, and years of distrust and insolence? In the end, Dostoevsky seems to argue for the good of mankind and the destruction resulting from Ivan-like intellectualism, Dmitri-like debauchery and Smerdyakov-like immorality. Alyosha ends up a hero to children; Ivan comes near-death with a hallucination-producing brain fever; Dmitri accepts his guilt (not of murder, but of a life of debauchery and honorlessness); and Smerdyakov ends up committing suicide in order to run from his guilt and complicity. However, the endings are not as conclusive as they seem. Ivan does not die from his fever, Dmitri plans to escape his prison sentence and run away with Grushenka, and the suicide of Smerdyakov destroys the defense of Dmitri--thus condemning him for a crime he did not commit. Justice is not, in a sense, served. Finally and most befuddling, the debates that rage through the pages of the book between God and the Devil, faith and cynicism, and the goodness of humanity versus the evil of humanity all remain unresolved completely. Ivan argues with the Devil during an attack of fever, weighing Western morality in the scales of reality. Ivan also argues explicitly for the ineffectiveness of Christianity, and thus the victory of the Devil and the evil of humanity, in "The Grand Inquisitor". "There is no morality," Ivan proclaims throughout the book, and remains wholly unrefuted by Alyosha and Father Zossima. Though we know Dostoevsky personally believed in God and that he intended for goodness to win in The Brothers, he purposely made the resolution of the book inconclusive. The questions left in the air after finishing the book give weight to Dostoevsky's arguments, and also comment on the inconclusiveness of human nature and reality. Dostoevsky addresses many psychoanalytical questions in his book, and while addressing each with great accuracy, leaves many of his answers open-ended to point out the complexity of human nature.
But in a more definitive sense, Dostoevsky also contributed greatly to the field of psychoanalysis with the in-depth characters of The Brothers Karamazov. He describes the "accidental family" in which each member is separated from the others and lives and independent and isolated life-- a then-revolutionary idea that contributed to its development as an aspect of psychology. He also discovered that there is a tendency to despotism, a "will to power", inherent in man. He found that love contains among its elements the desire to exercise power over its beloved, and that if this love is not gratified then the loved one can be hated and loved at the same time. In Dostoevsk'y observations of the love of self-torture and punishment as a guilt-cleansing technique, he anticipated the modern theory of "death-instinct" and Freud's "beyond the pleasure principle". He even recorded in detail the workings of the "split-personality". He described it in its mild-- Katerina and her love-hate and Lise with her radical, unpredictable temperament-- as well as its most extreme pathological manifestations-- Ivan's two selves who come to clash in his conversation with his hallucinatory Devil.
Summary.Themes of the Book.Poetry Inspired by the Book.
Critiques of the Book.The Life of Dostoyevsky.Personal Analysis.>.