David Denby, staff writer and film critic for The New Yorker, published (June 29, 2020) an account of reading Crime and Punishment with a Lit Hum class at Columbia taught by Nick Dames, one of its best teachers. "Lit Hum," or Literary Humanities, is a required course for all undergraduates, and depending on the teacher can be anything from brilliant tour to an arduous trek. Under Dames' astute guidance, the students and Denby read Dostoyevsky's impassioned, digressive, and intricate prose and connected the critical passages.
The survey course in Spring 2020 took place throughout the great disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic; eight hours of discussion of the novel took place after the great disapora sent students from on-ground class in Hamilton Hall to a Zoom room wherever each might have landed. For Denby, the novel dovetailed with his life stuck in an Upper West Side apartment, hearing constant sirens, joining the 7:00 p.m. banging of pots at windows, sounds that connected isolated individuals in their social responsibility with the city's life, in the catastrophic solidarity of a Greek chorus.
Denby's moving account resists easy summary; I will not summarize it but pick out two elements that yet resonate now months later. Raskolnikov's haunting dream of social breakdown, a war of all against all in which each, infected by virus-like trichinae, knows that he or she alone is right, "each thought the truth was contained in himself alone . . . . They did not know whom or how to judge, could not agree on what to regard as evil, what as good"—this dream struck several readers uncannily. One young student (Julia) saw in it a political science fiction, evoking our present conflicts and mutually-assured contradictions that brook no shared facts or vocabulary. She saw in the faces of demonstrators in Michigan (in April, armed and angry at their state capitol) the unshakeable convictions of blind self-assurance, just as the fury of those infected by the novel trichinae in the dream.
Raskolnikov's dream comes a few pages before the end of novel, an Epilogue that places the reader outside of the feral voices in Raskolnikov's head, so filled with conflict and outrage. Sonya, a teenage prostitute who befriended him in St. Petersburg, and despite his rejection even came to love him, followed him to a camp outside a distant Siberian town. He can no longer avoid confrontation with Sonya's lived, real-world "insatiable compassion" and the implacable necessity of his own suffering. He discovers that "instead of dialectics, there was life." Instead of acrid theories of banal murder, "he could only feel. . . . [S]omething completely different had to work itself out in his consciousness." Denby quotes Nick Dames' remark: "The novel is a strong rebuke to individual happiness and individual rights and autonomy." Denby concludes,
Every day, in Trump's America, it seemed as though we were coming closer to the annihilating turmoil—the mixed state of vexation and fear—in Raskolnikov's dream. . . . I kept returning to Dostoyesvsky's book, looking for signs of how collective purpose can heal social divisions and injustices, stoking hope and resolve along side fear, anything that would overtake the desperate anomie that Raskolnikov's dream had conjured: "In the cities the bells rang all day long: everyone was being summoned, but no one knew who was summoning them or why.
The bells led me back to the ending of The Brothers Karamazov, and perhaps a durable response to Denby's and Rasknolnikov's searches.
The Brothers Karamazov also ends with an Epilogue that ties up most of the complex narrative threads. A family drama, a who-dunit, a coming-of-age novel, and an ersatz romance (among many other angles), the novel is maddeningly difficult both to read and to conclude. Tthe characters' lives seem capable of carrying on with neither author nor reader.
After five hundred pages, an unlikely sort of Greek chorus of schoolboys emerges on the heels of a hitherto minor incident. The impulsive Dimitri Karamzov humiliated an impoverished Captain (Snegiryov) by pulling him out of local tavern by his beard. Snegiryov's proud, frail son (Ilyusha or Ilyuschechka) bitterly resented his father's humiliation and the mocking he had to endure from his schoolmates: he stabbed their leader, Kolya Krasotkin, with a pen knife. When Ilyusha threw stones at them, he accidentally hit Aloysha (Alexei Karamazov), the nineteen-year-old, handsome brother who is the moral center of the book: kind, energetic, and empathetic almost to a fault (as religiously very conservative for his generation). Alyosha reached out to Ilyuschechka and all the boys. They wind up obliquely commenting on adults around them.
The novel careens through Dimitri's trial, who is charged with murdering their wily, fatuous, knave of a father. His brother Ivan organized his brother's defense and orchestrated his planned escape, along with the machinations of two women (Gruschenka and Katerina Ivanovna) who forlornly loved their Mitya. Meanwhile Alyosha and the schoolboys inhabit almost a kind of parallel universe in the small, unnamed town, and the parallel drama of Ilyuschechka's death from tuberculosis two days after Dmitri's sentencing.
As Aloysha rushed from Katerina's decisive encounter Dimitri and Gruschenka, church bells summoned him and the boys to Ilyuschechka's funeral. The melodramatic narrative of alcohol, flowers, Ilyuschechka's frail mother, and the passage of the coffin to the church gives way to solemnity of the boys standing watch by the casket through the service. This bells are no western, tolling bourdon; the extravangant, Russian tinntabulation that builds up overtones and reverberates down the streets conjures the otherworldly play of light, incense, chanting, and movement in the old church, "rather poor, many of the icons were without settings." The author himself experienced such shock, loss, and splendor at the death of his 3-year-old son Alyosha in 1878, as he wrote the book.
Dostoyevsky, turned to Orthodoxy after reading the Gospels in a Siberian prison, and always paid careful attention to liturgical details. After the Epistle (probably I Thessalonians 4:13-17), Snegiryov "suddenly whispered to Alyosha, who was standing beside him, that the reading had not been done right," without explanation. During the Cherubic Hymn (sung at the priest's Entrance to the Sanctuary), "kneeling down, [Snegiryov] touched his forehead to the stone floor of the church, and remained lying like that for quite a long time," prostrate before the divine splendor. Though the hymn's text is short, the chant is in a drawn-out, ethereal style, a human supplement to the singing of the heavenly hosts:
We, who mystically represent the Cherubim, And chant the thrice-holy hymn tot he Life-giving Trinity, Let us set aside the cares of life, That we may receive the King of all, Who comes invisibly escorted by the Divine Hosts.
"Let us set aside the cares of life" is exactly what Snegiryov still cannot do in his grief, clutching at the funeral flowers from the casket, as he crumbles bread crumbs for the birds who will keep his son company in his grave, symbolically receiving the King of all on his behalf. But rising from the cares of life is exactly what Aloysha did, when he and the boys came upon Ilyuschechka's standing stone, where the dead boy had cried out against his father's humiliation at Mitya's hands. Aloysha's speech to the boys concludesthe book, "Gentlemen, we shall be parting soon." He commanded them to promise never to forget Ilyuschechka, "whom we once threw stones at—and whom afterwards we all came to love so much."
And even though we may be involved with the most important affairs, achieve distinction or fall into some great misfortune—all the same, let us never forget how good we once felt here, altogether, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, for the time that we loved the poor boy, perhaps better than we actually are.
Even should one of the boys become the "most cruel and jeering man," he "will still not dare laugh within himself at how kind and good he was at this present moment! Moveover, perhaps just this memory alone will keep him from great evil, and he will think better of it and say: 'Yes, I was kind, brave, and honest then.'" Alyosha implored them, "let us never forget one another . . . I shall keep you all in my heart, and I ask you to keep me in your hearts, too! Well, and who united us in this good, kind feeling . . . who, if not Ilyuschechka, that good boy, that kind boy, that boy dear to us unto ages of ages! . . . . Dear friends, do not be afraid of life!"
And then the thrust of the whole book:
"Karamazov," cried Kolya, "can it really be true as religion says, that we all shall rise from the dead, and come to life, and see one another again, and everyone, and Ilyuschechka?"
"Certainly we shall rise, certainly we shall see and gladly, joyfully tell one another all that has been," Alyosha replied, half laughing, half in ecstasy.
Then the detail both eschatological and incarnational: "Well, and now let's end our speeches and go to his memorial dinner. Don't be disturbed that we'll be eating pancakes. It's an ancient, eternal thing, and there's good in that too." Kolya cried, "And eternally so, all our lives hand in hand! Hurrah for Karamazov!"
The book's epigraph reads, 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)
Karamazov's bells—ringing for Ilyuschechka, for the resurrection—answers the summoning bells in Raskolnikov's dream. A westerner might assume that the bell's summoning in Crime and Punishment is a single ring, perhaps fast as in colonial New England--but in a Russian city "the bells rang all day," many bells in vivid strike and reverberation. In this Epilogue, too, Dostoyevsky's mastery of liturgical details goes to work. "During the second week of the Great Lent, it was [Raskolnikov's] turn to fast and go to services together with his barracks" (undoubtedly because the whole camp would fit in or even around the church). The Gospel for that Saturday (John 5:24-30) is the same as was used in the Orthodox funeral liturgy for Ilyuschechka: For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself . . . for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation. While Rodya moped, Sonya acted on behalf of the prisoners and families stood in for the healing Christ; "they even came to her with their ailments."
"Raskolnikov lay in the hospital all through the end of Lent and Holy Week" when he recalled his haunting dream in this liturgical context—but never named Easter directly. The second week after Holy Week, recovered enough to be put back to work, Raskolnikov walked out of his work shed and looked across a wide, desolate river, to see an utterly different, pastoral people live free, where "time itself seemed to stop, as if the centuries of Abraham and his flocks had not passed." Suddenly Sonya was beside him, "came up almost inaudibly," alluding to Jesus' appearing to St. Thomas and the twelve (John 20:19 ff.), the traditional reading for the second week of Easter. Where Jesus showed Thomas his side, Sonya gives Rodya her hand, and "it was as if something lifted him and flung him down at her feet . . . for her there was no longer any doubt that he loved her," that he was capable of love.
"There already shone the dawn of a renewed future, of a complete resurrection into a new life. They were resurrected by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other." But this is no romantic fade-out: "They still had seven years more, and until then so much unbearable suffering, and so much infinite happiness! But he was risen and he knew it, he felt it fully with the whole of his renewed being, and she—she lived just by his life alone!"
All his past torments began to feel strange to Raskolnikov, unable to resolve anything; "he could only feel. Instead of dialectics, there was life." In response, he took the Gospels from under his pillow, from which she had read to him about the raising of Lazarus." He did not even open the book; he did not yet know the kind of new life that would not be given him for nothing, which still had to be dearly bought, "to be paid for with a great future deed. . . "
Denby's search for signs of how collective purpose can heal social divisions finds no easy conclusion in Trump's America now, as Dostoyevsky's found none in Tsarist Russia. Dostoyevsky seemed in retrospect to have sensed all the warning signs of repression, Revolution and the descent into the Abyss of Stalinism (and now Putinism). Whether in the Spring pandemic (and its Summer and Fall continuation), the continuing racial unrest, economic disaster, environmental apocalypse, and craven, hypocritical electoral and judicial politics, many Americans have completely disengaged from the Constitutional order. With all of our society's social and ecological danger signs are blinking red, is this search for signs in literature merely quixotic pursuit of bitter old people teaching impressionable youth?
I must answer No: Dostoyevsky's great books still offer us renewal through remembering our hope and suffering (such as the awakening to past and continuing witnessed this Summer). They can awaken us to responsibility for the ecological, public health, and economic mess that we have made. Both Alyosha and Sonya point to what is greater: "instead of dialectics, there was life," contradictory, complex, compelling and above all creative. Those bells summon us to engage neither domination nor surrender, but memory and hope: to remember the great, humane story of suffering and rebirth that transcends our mess (bad as it is), to the ancient and eternal act of eating pancakes for the dead. In Beloved, Amy said to Sethe while massaging her swollen feet, "Anything dead coming back to life hurts." It's hurting now: life instead of dialectics.
These summons also suggest the fevered, prolix, impossibly complex Angels in America. At the end of Perestroika (Part 2) Prior Walter, in his final febrile vision, tells the Continental Principalities (Angels) "I still want . . . My blessing. Even sick. I want to be alive." To which his Angel replies, "You only think you do. Life is a habit with you. You have not seen what is to come: We have: What will the grim Unfolding of these Latter Days bring?" Despite her vivid invocation of more horror than can be borne, Prior insists, "But still. Still. Bless me anyway. I want more life. I can't help myself. I do . . . . I recognize the habit. The addiction to being alive. We live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough, so inadequate but . . . Bless me anyway. I want more life."
We live past hope, past dialectics, past disease and chaos. In this hinge of history, when horror meets horror and hope seems so much not enough, so inadequate — we still want more life. We still hear the bells summoning us to responsibility, thrice-holy, with the One whom comes invisibly escorted by Divine hosts. We stand at the stone of remembering, live past hope, and eat our pancakes for the dead.