Posts Tagged ‘The Brothers Karamazov’
Dostoyevsky, Ivan Karamazov and the Grand Inquisitor fantasy
cushy torture – ‘nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition…’
I don’t tend to read novels these days, but I’ve recently joined a book group of friends who meet to discuss a selected Work of Literary Importance, and currently it’s Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I’ve actually read the book twice before, but as many have said, when you read the same book decades apart, it really isn’t the same book.
And of course when you’re reading a book in translation, and written over 150 years ago, can you trust what you’re reading? Is it better to read a modern translation or, in this case, one closer to Dostoyevsky’s time? Imagine, say, translating Shakespeare into Russian. Impossible, right? But surely it’s been done, and why not? I’ve no doubt there are highly intelligent bilinguists who’ve managed to render the freshness of Shakespeare’s 400-year-old language into dazzlingly fresh 400-year-old Russian, though my brain hurts just thinking about it.
Anyway, I’m currently reading Karamazov online in the good old Constance Garnett 1916 translation (the original was first published in 1880), and when I get to part two I’ll switch to David Magarshack’s 1958 translation, which I have on my shelves. And personally I find that Garnett’s translation does a fine job of capturing Dostoyevsky’s sometimes over-the-top intensity and self-mocking humour. It really rollicks along, in a grotesque sort of way.
I’m definitely getting more out of this third reading than from previous ones (or maybe I’ve just forgotten…) and I certainly feel that Ivan Karamazov is the novel’s central and most interesting character and obviously closest to Dostoyevsky himself. This is brought home in the conversation with Alyosha – actually largely a monologue – that precedes his fantasy of the Grand Inquisitor, which I’ll focus on in detail – or maybe not.
Actually I found the Grand Inquisitor story, which has of course become famous, something of an anti-climax, and a source of irritation, probably because my anti-Catholicism has hardened over the years. I was more impressed and moved by Ivan’s distress at the everyday injustices of Russian life, especially the treatment of children. In his rambling but passionate monologue on injustice and cruelty with precedes the Grand Inquisitor fable he comes closer to modern thinking – it seems to me – than in all the god talk that follows. Take this, for example:
Suppose I, for instance, suffer intensely. Another can never know how much I suffer, because he is another and not I. And what’s more, a man is rarely ready to admit another’s suffering (as though it were a distinction). Why won’t he admit it, do you think? Because I smell unpleasant, because I have a stupid face, because I once trod on his foot. Besides, there is suffering and suffering; degrading, humiliating suffering such as humbles me—hunger, for instance—my benefactor will perhaps allow me; but when you come to higher suffering—for an idea, for instance—he will very rarely admit that, perhaps because my face strikes him as not at all what he fancies a man should have who suffers for an idea.
Living in the centre of a city, as I do, it’s impossible not to see physical suffering on a daily basis – as well as the inscrutable faces of a procession of people who may or may not be carrying a world of regret or frustration in their hearts. To think about it is often too overwhelming – better to confine yourself to your own business and its profits and losses. Which makes me think of what we owe to others, as the most socially constructed species on the planet, and what we’ve come to believe we owe to ourselves as fully-fledged members of the increasingly individualised WEIRD world (see the references).
But let’s get back to Ivan. Or Ivan/Dostoyevsky. He comes out with half-truths, half-buried insights, as people do in conversation:
… the stupider one is, the closer one is to reality. The stupider one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence wriggles and hides itself. Intelligence is a knave, but stupidity is honest and straightforward. I’ve led the conversation to my despair, and the more stupidly I have presented it, the better for me.
Dostoyevsky, it seems to me is very good at presenting people struggling for insight and often failing. What we get here, I think, is Ivan’s mixed feelings of irritation and envy for the ‘simple-minded’, however he conceives them. He seems often tormented by his own intellect, and the complexity of his feelings. Hence his sympathy, mixed with a degree of contempt, for Alyosha. He takes the injunction to ‘love thy neighbour’ (Matthew 22:39) as impossibly unreasonable, though makes something of an exception for children, channeling into the concern we all have for the powerless, vulnerable and innocent. To highlight the impossibility of Christ’s injunction he cites a host of historical cruelties by ‘Turks and Circassians’, though of course he could’ve cited the Mongols under Ghengis Khan and Tamarlane and others, the Christian slaughter of tens of thousands of Moslems and Jews in the Holy Land, the Catholic mass-murder of the fellow-Christian Cathars, and the Russian massacres in the east under Ivan the Terrible – etc etc. Then he tells another more modern story of a young man, brought up in squalor and horribly mistreated, who grows up to be a thief and finally a murderer. At the end he repents and is made much of as a redeemed soul, before being guillotined. What are we to make of this story, and Ivan’s attitude? It seems clear that he’s mocking, or expressing disgust for, our dehumanising of others, and then punishing them for their inhumane behaviour, while congratulating ourselves on their repentance. Could something be rotten in the state of Christianity?
Ivan next turns to the ill-treatment of the clearly innocent, from pack horses being beaten to death, to children:
You see, I must repeat again, it is a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing children, and children only. To all other types of humanity these torturers behave mildly and benevolently, like cultivated and humane Europeans; but they are very fond of tormenting children, even fond of children themselves in that sense. It’s just their defenselessness that tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal, that sets his vile blood on fire. In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden—the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain…
This sort of stuff is personal for me, I must say, as I left school at fifteen after being slapped across the face with full force by a sadistic headmaster, and have been plagued by revenge fantasies ever since. But this was nothing compared to the stories of child abuse and murder Ivan goes on to recount, stories, or rather, truths, which make him almost ashamed to love his own human life so much, when he observes the inhumanity around him. And although he’s friendly to and sometimes envious of Alyosha, he’s not easily taken in his brother’s ‘loving-kindness’ – “You are trying to save me, but perhaps I am not lost!”
Ivan professes belief in ‘God’- clearly the ultra-male monolatrist-cum-monotheist one created in the land of Canaan around 2,600 years ago – but he understandably wonders how one could respect a god that permits such cruelty in the world, or, more to the point, creates creatures who commit such cruelties. And this appears to be the point of his talk with Alyosha, to whom he at one point says “I won’t give you up to your Zossima”. Ivan may only be pretending to believe in God in order to get Alyosha to listen and question. Even if all he can offer is torment and cynicism.
And yet, what Ivan expresses a hope and a hearing for makes perfect sense. An end to wanton cruelty, including the additional cruelty imposed upon the cruel. Hell’s torture imposed upon the damned, for example. All of this, thinking from a post-religious context, one that I inhabit, brings me to the issue of free will, crime and punishment, but that I’ll reserve for a future post.
So, after all this tortured talk, Ivan relates his fable of the Grand Inquisitor. It’s a clever idea. Jesus, the putative son of God, supposedly martyred for our sins 2000 years ago, turns up in 15th century Seville in the midst of a large-scale auto-da-fé and, though silent, is immediately recognised and adored by the crowd, especially after he starts tossing miracles about the place. He’s just performed the highlight of his show, raising a dead child from her coffin, when a 90-year-old Cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor, arrives on the scene, orders the Jesus to be arrested and imprisoned, and his men to get back to the business of burning heretics, Jews and other riffraff.
Later that evening, the Inquisitor pays a visit to God’s offspring in his cell. Turns out he (the Inquisitor) has a lot to say, and his speech is impressively voluminous for a ninety-year-old. The Jesus figure, meanwhile, remains as silent as a god. And the Inquisitor’s message, for all its verbosity, is pretty basic (and I suspect a modern translator would dispense with the ‘thou wast’ and ‘thou hast’ etc, as per the MEV Bible). He’s saying that, after many centuries of struggle, the Church (as it was then, before the Reformation put a spanner in the works) has effectively corrected the ‘I will make you free’ promise made somewhere in the gospels:
let me tell Thee that now, to‐day, people are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet. But that has been our doing.
It’s the old argument of dictators everywhere, still used – in fact it’s the MAGA argument, if you can call it an argument. Leave everything to me/us and we will provide you with something much better than freedom. ‘Man was created a rebel and how can rebels be happy?’ says the nonagenarian.
Next, our Inquisitor goes on at length about the three ‘satanic’ temptations in the desert – in short, providing food to the people gratis, proclaiming/displaying absolute power, and dazzling the people into belief through miraculous displays. We’re treated to a lot of rhetoric here, to the effect that the Church, groaning under the weight of its own leadership, has taken upon itself the burden that Jesus rejected, providing sustenance, authority, and officially sanctioned miracles, and there’s no way they’re going to let any sons of deities come along and upset all that hard graft. Oh, and by the way, he admits in passing that they’ve done all this by working for the Other Side.
So the whole of the Inquisitor’s speech can be seen, perhaps, as an anti-Catholic tirade presented as a pro-Catholic tirade, as well as a withering description of human inhumanity and fecklessness. It goes a bit far, in my view, but then in my own reading and researches, at least recently, I tend to learn about exceptionally clever people – generally more clever than myself – doing exceptionally clever things, so I suppose that’s a different bias…
References
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The brothers Karamazov, 1980. Translated by Constance Garnett, 1916
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world: how the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, 2020.
Simon Sebag Montefiore, The world, a family history, 2022