Dostoevsky (188 page)

Book 6, “The Russian Monk,” is an account of Zosima’s life and teachings cast in the form of a
zhitie
, the hagiographical biography of the life of a saint as composed by his disciple, Alyosha. It is perhaps the most artistically daring section of the work—in the sense that it is almost unprecedented to include in a novel, except perhaps for purposes of parody, an extended example of a text imitative of a purely religious genre. While
The Brothers Karamazov
is filled with violent movement, strong passions, and intense psychological dramatics, the
zhitie
lacks (quite intentionally) the powerful vehemence to which it is meant to respond, and most modern readers have considered it ineffectual in countering the brunt of Ivan’s unbridled assault. However that may be, there is no doubt that Zosima conveys the essence of Dostoevsky’s own moral-social views, and the account of Zosima’s life also plays an important part in the structure of the novel.

Through Zosima Dostoevsky was trying to present an alternative attitude toward life and toward the problem of human suffering—an attitude of serene acceptance of human destiny deriving from a conviction in the all-forgiving mercy of a loving God. Figures embodying states of virtuous beatitude have always been more difficult to make interesting and convincing than those struggling to confront the problems of human existence. Nonetheless, Dostoevsky took the risk of couching the response to Ivan in the genre of a saint’s life, written in a highly poetic style full of Church Slavonic expressions and the pious language of Saint Tikhon Zadonsky’s eighteenth-century clerical sentimentalism. Since no attempt is made to ground such a narrative in realistic particularities or verisimilar psychological analyses, events occur according to the laws of the moral lesson to be illustrated, not by the causality of mundane existence. There is a timeless quality about such narratives precisely because they are related to the real world only in an ancillary fashion, and the moral they exemplify remains valuable for any time and any place.

Book 6 has not fared very well in critical opinion because it is viewed primarily as a direct answer to the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. Commentators have not paid sufficient attention to Dostoevsky’s remark that “
the whole novel
is an answer” to Ivan and his Legend. Such a definitive assertion makes us aware that Dostoevsky was not depending
only
on these stories and utterances to accomplish his artistic task. This will be achieved through the interweaving of Zosima’s experiences with the remainder of the plot-action, which reveals the salutary effect of his own life, and of the values he practiced, on the lives of others. It will illustrate as well that the image delineated by the Grand Inquisitor of a weak, debased humanity, incapable of fulfilling Christ’s law of love, is delusory and pernicious.

The stories of Book 6 are narrated, as in a
zhitie
, in a style intended to awaken pious and reverential responses, and to communicate a sense of serenity opposed to the agitations and passions depicted elsewhere. It begins with the life of Zosima’s elder brother Markel, who had converted to atheism as a youth but then, after being suddenly taken ill, his spirit is transformed by the immanence of death. Attempting to comfort his grieving mother, he tells her that “we are all in paradise, but we won’t see it; if we would, we should have heaven on earth the next day” (14: 262). Feeling unworthy of the love lavished on him, he desires to change places with the servants. He tells his mother that “every one of us has sinned against all men, and I more than any.” Like Saint Francis, he asks pardon from the birds and from nature because “there was such a glory of God all about me, birds, trees, meadows, sky, only I lived in shame and dishonored it all and did not notice the beauty and glory” (14: 263). Not understanding this act of self-surrender to “the glory of God,” the family doctor, a man of science, declares that Markel’s “disease is affecting his brain” (14: 262). But the afflicted young man is only rejoicing in that ecstatic apprehension of life as an ultimate good that even Ivan had experienced, and he embodies this crucial epiphanic sentiment—that Dostoevsky himself had once voiced in the shadow of death.

Zosima confides details of his own early years that fill out the picture of his spiritual formation, and here again Dostoevsky draws on particularities from his own life, recalling the deep impression made on him by the book of Job during a pre-Easter mass. The ancient biblical cry of anguish against a presumably merciful God, who submits His faithful servitor to the worst torments in order to test his loyalty, bears the closest connection with Dostoevsky’s thematics, and Zosima is still deeply moved by it: “I’ve never been able to read that sacred book without tears.” Some have been incited by it to mock and blame God because of the terrible fate so unjustly meted out to the righteous Job; but the greatness of the work “lies just in the fact that it is a mystery—that the passing earthly scene and the eternal verity are brought together in it” (14: 265). Zosima says nothing about Job’s anguished outcries and accusations. The “mystery” of the tale for him is that, despite his “earthly” sufferings, Job still proclaims his faith in God and in the goodness of God’s creation.

If Zosima’s first narrative is associatively linked to Alyosha, then the second, dealing with his own life as a young man, is related to Dimitry. Sent by his mother to a school for military cadets in Petersburg, Zinovy (his secular name) had, by the time he graduated, been “transformed into a cruel, absurd, almost savage creature” (14: 268). The calamitous events that follow, precipitated by a blow to his vanity and pride, lead to a crisis during which, implicitly, the lessons of Markel begin to work in his soul (14: 270). He participates in a duel but refuses to fire, apologizes to his servant for having beaten him, and resigns his
Army commission, announcing that he was entering a monastery. Here is a foreshadowing of Dimitry’s future self-discovery and moral transformation.

The third story, “The Mysterious Visitor,” is clearly connected with Ivan. A respected citizen, well known for his charitable activities, visits Zinovy, who has become known for acting in accordance with
his
moral conscience rather than submitting to the non-Christian code of his position and rank. The older man’s interest was inspired by “a secret motive”—he himself is a murderer! (14: 274). As a young man, out of jealousy, he had killed a girl who refused his suit, and he had successfully made it appear as a robbery. He had hoped that family life would help him escape brooding over his past; but the presence of his wife and children only made the memory of his crime more oppressively painful, and he became haunted by the idea of ending his torments with a full confession.

Like Ivan, the visitor was concerned with the general moral situation of society and human life. He reiterates one of the favorite ideas expressed in the
Diary
, that the modern world is living through a period of “isolation” in which the solidarity of humans with each other has been replaced by separation and division. Change can come only through “a spiritual, psychological process. . . . Until you have become really, in actual fact, a brother to everyone, brotherhood will not come to pass. No sort of scientific teaching, no kind of common interest, will ever teach us to share property and privileges with equal consideration for all.” Eventually, “this terrible individualism must indubitably have an end. . . . And then the sign of the Son of Man will be seen in the heavens,” the sign presumably announcing the Second Coming of Christ (14: 274).

Despite all the torments that the visitor knows will ensue, he follows Zinovy’s advice to confess. Nobody believes the confession of this model citizen, who has led such an exemplary life (any more than Ivan will be believed in the courtroom scene later). And when the mysterious visitor, producing evidence of his crime, is declared insane, the parallel with Ivan could not be clearer. A few days later the penitent murderer is taken ill and dies; before his death he admits to Zinovy that, on his last visit, he had come back to kill him. But “the Lord vanquished the devil in my heart” and stayed his hand (exactly as will occur with Dimitry) (14: 283). All three stories are a
mise en abyme
, that is, a relatively subordinate narrative element either reproducing
in nuce
the main theme of the work, or presenting it as here in a form somewhat altered but still recognizable. Zosima’s
zhitie
is not his alone but that of the three Karamazov brothers as well. Each story indicates the paths that all (including Ivan) will take in the remainder of the book to refute his Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.

Zosima’s narratives are followed by a chapter of his “conversations and exhortations,” in which Dostoevsky, without concern for their didacticism, develops
some of his own most cherished ideas. Monasticism and the Russian monks are defended against their numerous critics. Zosima replies in terms of Dostoevsky’s religious messianism, which views the Russian monks as those who “keep the image of Christ pure and undefiled.” By contrast, those worldly people who criticize the monks “have science, but in science there is nothing but what is the object of sense. The spiritual world, the higher part of man’s being is rejected altogether, dismissed with a sort of triumph, even hatred.” The modern world has proclaimed “the reign of freedom” and “the multiplication of desires,” but such an unregulated existence can only lead among the rich to “isolation and spiritual suicide; in the poor, [to] envy and murder; for they have been given rights, but have not been shown the means of satisfying their wants” (14: 284).

Zosima plays variations on this contrast between the life of the worldly, who sacrifice everything to their ever-increasing desires, and the regime of the monks, which consists of “obedience, fasting, and prayer.” For Dostoevsky, “freedom” meant mastery and suppression of one’s desires, not liberation from all constraints on their satisfaction; such a life of self-control was for him the only “way to real, true freedom.” But the humble, believing Russian people were not immune to the new forces of disintegration undermining society, and Zosima utters a horrified castigation of “the fire of corruption” spreading through the peasantry itself, here touching on the actual problems of Russian society, including drunkenness and child labor (14: 286). But what will ultimately save the Russians, Zosima affirms, is the consciousness of their iniquity—one of the extremely dubious linchpins of Dostoevsky’s ideology since the early 1860s.

Zosima launches into an encomium of the Russian peasantry, and he dreams of a halcyon social future, one that “will come to pass when even the most corrupt of our rich will end by being ashamed of his riches before the poor, and the poor, seeing his humility, will understand and give way before him, and will respond joyfully and kindly to his honorable shame” (14: 286). Here, unquestionably, is Dostoevsky’s own dream-world of the Russian future, expressed with all the naïveté suitable for Zosima. Of course, all these ingenuous expectations will be met with mockery, but Zosima thinks that those who rely on reason alone to reach the same goal of unity and solidarity (the Socialists) “have more fantastic dreams than we. They aim at justice, but, denying Christ, they will end flooding the earth with blood.” Indeed, “were it not for Christ’s covenant, they would slaughter one another down to the last two men on earth,” and even those two would kill each other “in their pride” (14: 287–288).

In his most overtly theological preachment, he tells them to pray every day for all those whose souls were appearing before God at that moment. Such prayer is only one expression of the universality of love that is the leitmotif of Zosima’s admonitions. “For all is like an ocean, all is flowing and bending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth.” He also
insists that it is necessary “to love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of the Divine love and is the highest love on earth.” Love “all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it . . . every ray of God’s light, love the animals, love the plants, love everything” (14: 288–289).