ANALYSIS OF SMERDJAKOV

Vladimir Volkov, USA

What is a prophet?
Is it a man who scans the future better than we do and therefore descries in it more than we? In other words, a man with binoculars?

I do not think so. I'd rather believe he is a man who studies his own depth and finds there the fundamental structures of the world. He may, like Isaiah, deduce from them some aspects of the future, but basically his role, as the astronomer's or the nuclear physicist's, consists in discovering architectures.

As a prophet, Dostoevsky has discovered several. In particular, he perceived that the essential form of the human cell is not the man-woman couple (which, of course, was already implicitly contained in Plato: Man being androgynous by essence, the differences between men and women should be interpreted as functional), but the father-son link, seen, from our Christian standpoint, as an image of the Father-Son dyad in Trinity.

Dostoevsky has demonstrated this intuition in many ways, and among others, ab absurdо, in his characterization of Smerdjakov.

Smerdjakov, for us, has four sides, and they correspond to four aspects of the same lack: he is illegitimate, impotent, a parricide and a self-killer.

First, one must observe that Smerdjakov's illegitimacy is not an accident of fiction. To a certain extent he is supposed to be old Karamazov's bastard, but neither reader nor narrator are really sure of it: Smerdjakov is just enough Karamazov's son to be illegitimate, and just little enough to have no known father. He is as much of a no father's son as one can be. His other father, the foster one, Grigorij, is full of hatred and contempt for him, and, far from adopting him (in the sense in which Gabriel Marcel says that real fatherhood can be achieved only through adoption), on the contrary, accuses him of having been born not of human parents, but "of the dampness of the bath" (iz bannoj mokroty), like mold. This dampness has given Smerdjakov quite an anemic blood; his body and soul are equally sick; the bastard is also what is vulgarly known as a sissy. And what about his name? His first name and patronymic are his potential father's read backwards: Pavel Fedorovich for Fedor Pavlovich, and his last name, "Stinker", was concocted for him by the same potential father, supposedly as a derivation from his mother's nickname ("Smerdjashchaja", the Stinking one), but, I suspect, probably for a less anecdotic reason. Who

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is "the stinker" par excellence?  Rottenness, death. And Smerdjakov, who has no father, cannot have received life in its fullness. He is an embryo attacked by gangrene.

He knows it himself. He fully acknowledges that he "comes from the stinking one" - and one thinks of Karl Barth: non-being seen as the lining of being - so much so that he utters this fearful statement: "I'd have let I them kill me in my mother's bosom so as not to have to be born to this world." This is not criticizing or excusing abortion as such: this is demanding it for oneself, monstrously pulling back into the depth of time, considering one's own birth as an aborted abortion.

The second basic facet of Smerdjakov's personality is a rejection of life not as received, but as lived and transmitted. He is impotent, he is sterile, but he is not only that. The narrator tells us quite openly that Smerdjakov is a eunuch, but he is as unable to enjoy life as he is to reproduce it. His disgust before food goes beyond his inability in the erotic field. All the time, he thinks he finds dirt in his plate and picks at it with his fork. How different is Father Zosima who advises his disciples to fall on the ground and to kiss Mother Earth! The priest puts his lips to the dust on which he walks, while the lackey assumes fastidious airs before his supper. It is his, rather vulgar, way to "mail back his ticket to the Creator", as Ivan would say. Fatherless and sonless, Smerdjakov is the solitary link of a non-existing chain. Deprived of the double hold of reproduction, he rejects by the same token the Creator and his creation. And here Smerdjakov's sterility connects with his atheism (since it is clear enough that his protestations of faith are made partly of hypocrisy and partly of an intellectual weakness which forbids him from following through with his congenital attitude of negation). The Church must have reason for closing the priesthood to the impotent. Turning his back on incarnation as well as on that biological succession which makes us all Adam, Smerdjakov finally comes to grips with that of which life is only a symbol or an approximation. It is not so much breathing that disturbs him as being. Smerdjakov is haunted by the shapeless homesickness of non-being.

Here an objection could be raised: the poor fellow is not responsible for being a bastard and an eunuch. But who speaks of responsibility? I am not trying to prove that Smerdjakov is guilty of this or that. Morality is an abstraction, and Dostoevsky's mind was as concrete as they are made. Smerdjakov is a negator in the same way in which he is an epileptic. When I say he "turns his back", I do not mean his will but his nature. On the other hand, it is true that his will works in the same direction as his nature, and they will both drive him to the ultimate consequence of his denial of being: parricide. Science-fiction has discovered this paradox which is also a commonplace: in order not to be born, the surest way is to travel back in time and to kill your father before he has begotten you.

Parricide, the third aspect of Smerdjakov's personality, must be understood in its broadest sense. His first action upon entering the world was to kill his mother, who, it will be remembered, died in travail, and once

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again it is immaterial that he was not responsible for the deed. It is in the same spirit that he exclaims "I hate the whole of Russia", which qualifies him as a potential and collective matricide, since he not only denies his motherland (the French phrases he learns by heart before dying are a tangible sign of this denial), but he also proclaims: "I wish the destruction of all soldiers." Why soldiers? Because warriors are father figures, because they are the protectors of that hated motherland, because, in Nineteenth Century Russia, they appeared as the main support of the established paternal order. Ivan knows what he is talking about when he sees in Smerdjakov a future revolutionary: "vanguard meat when the time comes," is his curious expression. Of course, Smerdjakov is not alone in his plight: he represents the hardest concentration of that revolt against the father which boils in Dmitrij and Ivan and which, as we know, boiled in Dostoevsky himself. It is no coincidence if both Smerdjakov and Ivan declare they were not supposed to watch after their father: it is Cain's password, only slightly modified.

Fourth aspect. Smerdjakov puts the crowning touch to his nihilism by annihilating himself. His suicide, which no event, no psychological evolution, can satisfactorily motivate, seemed a long time inexplicable to me, and finally it is in its inexplicability itself that I find its deepest meaning. More or less artificial pretexts can be invented a posteriori, but the basic fact remains: Smerdjakov commits suicide without a motive, which shows that he could not have committed it. What is totally unjustified and nevertheless is, must be absolutely necessary. Smerdjakov's suicide is not an act; it has not the creative solemnity of a deliberate act; it is the discreet, automatic and somewhat obscene completion of a function, it is the expected return to original non-being. Smerdjakov is the pot that Saint Paul's potter melts again. He has never had any essence. A brillantined nincompoop, a failure of creation, he is existence per se. In other words, nothing.

I began by stating that a prophet is a discoverer. He is also a chooser, who seals with a yes or anathemizes with a no.

The Nineteenth Century has passed on to the Twentieth three great ideas, three doctrines which, of course, are not universally popular, but which seem to serve as the three main streams of the thinking of our times. They are: socialism, existentialism and psychoanalysis. These three systems which, at that period, were barely being hatched, Dostoevsky gobbled up, evaluated, and threw up. His whole production can be considered, among other things, as a fierce denunciation of these doctrines which he holds to be God- and Man-destructive. Not that he denied the importance of a Marx's, a Freud's or a Kierkegaard's meditations. On the contrary, he foresaw them, guessed at them, allowed them to bloom in his own soul, went one step further, and rejected them with horror. Oedipus' complex, denying one's background, rebellion, desiccation, betraying Mother Earth, all that, for Dostoevsky, could only end in tragedy. It is to be noted that Smerdjakov does not stab or shoot himself, but that he stops his own breathing, thereby depriving himself of the universal Breath, which is the Spirit.

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In order fully to understand the eschatological meaning of his end, maybe one should remember that other son of perdition who also succumbed to regret but not to repentance, who also gave back the money, and who also hanged himself. They say the tree on which he did it still trembles from head to foot; they also say his belly burst open and his entrails poured out on the ground.