Fyodor Dostoevsky

That there may be affinities between English Blake and Great Russian Fyodor Dostoevsky is itself surprising and ought not to be magnified, since the differences between the two seers are far more serious than any parallels in mythic projection. Despite his extraordinary powers of characterization and representation, the Dostoevsky of Karamazov is essentially an obscurantist, and Blake would have judged him to have been a greatly exalted version of his own Smerdyakov.

Fyodor Dostoevsky evidently did not much care for Ivan either, and no one could care for Smerdyakov.Yet all the Karamazovs burn with psychic energy, all are true sons of that terrible but exuberant father. Freud's essay "Dostoyevski and Parricide" ( 1928) should be supplemented by his Totem and Taboo, because the violent tyrant-father murdered by his sons in the Primal History Scene is akin to old Karamazov, who also wishes to appropriate all the women for himself.

Fyodor Pavlovich's peculiar vice however is non-Falstaffian. Falstaff after all is not a father, despite his longing to make Hal his son. Old Karamazov is primarily a father, the parody indeed of a bad father, almost the Freudian primitive father of Totem and Taboo. Still, this buffoon and insane sensualist is a fool in a complex way, almost a Shakespearean fool, seeing through all impostures, his own included. Fyodor Dostoevsky lies to keep in practice, but his lies generally work to expose more truth. He lives to considerable purpose, doubtless despite himself. The largest purpose, in one of Dostoevsky's terrible ironies, is to be the inevitable victim of patricide, of his four sons' revenge for their abused mothers.

The image of the father, for the reactionary Fyodor Dostoevsky, is ultimately also the image of the Czar and of God. Why then did Dostoevsky risk the ghastly Fyodor Pavlovich as his testament's vision of the father? I can only surmise that Dostoevsky's motivation was Jobean. If Old Karamazov is to be our universal father, then by identifying with Dmitri, or Ivan, or Alyosha (no one identifies with Smerdyakov!), we assume their Jobean situation. If your faith can survive the torment of seeing the image of paternal authority in Karamazov, then you are as justified as Job. Reversing Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoevsky persuades us that if we haven't had a bad enough father, then it is necessary to invent one. Old Karamazov is an ancestor-demon rather than an ancestor-god, a darkness visible rather than a luminous shadow.

By "broad" Jones means simply just too alive to deserve to die, which is what I myself would judge. So rammed with life is old Karamazov that his murder is a sin against life, life depraved and corrupt, yet fierce life, life refusing death. Even Dmitri falls short of his father's force of desire. Strangely like Blake again, Fyodor Dostoevsky proclaims that everything that lives is holy, though he does not share Blake's conviction that nothing or no one is holier than anything or anyone else.

In his Notebooks, Fyodor Dostoevsky insisted that "we are all, to the last man, Fyodor Pavloviches," because in a new, original form "we are all nihilists." A reader, but for the intercessions of his superego, might like to find himself in Falstaff, but hardly in Fyodor Pavlovich.Yet the honest reader should, and does, and no one wants to be murdered. As an apocalypse, The Brothers Karamazov forces identification upon one. The father in each male among us is compelled to some uncomfortable recognition in Old Karamazov; the son in each can choose among the three attractive brothers (Zosima is hardly a possibility). It cannot be said that Fyodor Dostoevsky does as well with women.