Story and Emotion in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov

Abstract

Research and dissemination of Dostoevsky’s work has been dominated by interest in the ideological aspects of his authorship. This is especially the case for his masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov (1880). In his monumental Dostoevsky. The Mantle of the Prophet 1871–1881 (2002), Joseph Frank, for example, writes that “Indeed this work towers even over his earlier masterpieces, and succeeds in achieving a classical expression of the great theme that had preoccupied him since Notes from the Underground: the conflict between reason and Christian faith” (Frank 2002, 567). This is evident too from Dostoevsky’s own self-understanding of and participation in his era, as it is expressed, for example, in his magazine Vremja and in Diary of a Writer. The conflict between ideas, ideologies and philosophies of life is central to all of Dostoevsky’s great novels. One has only to think of the contrast between Raskolnikov and Sonya in Crime and Punishment, the contrast between Myshkin and Rogozhin in The Idiot, or between Alyosha, Mitya and Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov. Still, it is surprising that the affective aspect has not played a larger role in the reception of Dostoevsky’s work. Deborah A. Martinsen’s book Surprised by Shame. Dostoevsky’s Liars and Narrative Exposure (2003), in which the study of shame plays a decisive roll, is an interesting exception. To my understanding, Dostoevsky is an author who in long passages in the course of the plot writes from one affect to the next, to the same extent that he writes from event to event. The affects are often the very incentives for the epic events, they are almost always unusually powerful, and the shift between different affects are possibly just as important happenings in the story as the outer events are. The affects often have as much of a meaning for the incidents as the incidents have on the affects. An indication of this focus on affects in The Brothers Karamazov comes as early as the opening discussion of the central father figure Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov’s first wife. The narrator wants to explain why a rich, beautiful and intelligent girl could decide to marry such an insignificant fellow and “illnatured buffoon” as Fyodor Pavlovich (Dostoevsky 1976, 3).9 The explanation is “romantic” inclinations, and in this connection the narrator refers to another