The Karamazovs as a Family of Artists

Regarded as an artist, Fedor Karamzov clearly belongs in the tradition of Russian buffoons, distinguished by what the novel's narrator chooses to call "бестолковость, да ее какая-то особенная национальная," (7) which means, for instance, that they can be very clever indeed as creators of a mock-dramatic performance. In this way Fedor is highly entertaining during his marvelously scandalous tour de force at the monastery, during the family gathering. His basic device there is to exacerbate his audience 

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by means of transparently feigned stupidity achieved by juxtaposing contradictions for maximum ironic effect. He wears the mask of a fool so he could claim the privilege of clowns to speak the truth while he is brazenly lying, and he calls himself ? "юродивый," the fool of God, to justify his grotesquely facetious blasphemies. By the use of such contrasts, Fedor maps out a theatrical space in which he lies prostrate on the floor of self-humiliation as if this were the romantic beau geste of an insulted artist ("для эстетики обижался") , and exalts Zosima with worshipful sarcasm: "священный старец"; "моему-то смирению есть ли при вашей гордости место?"  Through this, as it were, "обнажение эстетики" Fedor, of course, expects his audience, including us, to perceive his and Zosima's true positions exactly in reverse of his mock claims. The catch is that when we do so, we also accept his implicit message about the grotesque stupidity and vanity of all that the старец represents.

Having created his "esthetically insulted space," Fedor proceeds to populate it with vaguely Gogolian phantoms and grotesques, a cast of characters to enact the stupidity of holy things.(8) There is, for instance, the "направник-исправник," a peculiar species of "человек-каламбур," mocking both human purpose and justice, standing right next to the rationalist philosopher Diderot who, Fedor tells us, has come to dinner to say there is no God. Fedor has come to Zosima's dinner to say in effect the same thing;(9) hence, Diderot may well be his double whom Fedor "присочинил" to himself to be in his platonic cave the learned shadow of a clowning baboon. Somewhere nearby wanders an apocryphal saint carrying his severed head "любезно ее лобызаше," quite remarkable as a visual pun upon both sainthood and learning. We seem to enter a sort of self-mocking, real-unreal ontological dimension where the novel's great dilemma about the existence or nonexistence of God is cynically distorted to the point of its own hysterical travesty. The question "what is truth?" stands in front of a mirror which is itself a picture, the smirking image of Fedor Karamazov that says "воистину ложь есми и отец [or, possibly, сын] льжи." (10)  Thus Fedor, the "ungrateful biped," sticks his tongue out to Dostoevsky, his narrator, mocking and degrading the novel's grand moral and teleological design.(11)

But Dostoevsky is not to be trifled with, even by his own characters, for he can turn Fedor1s little jokes into ironic omens of his own miserable destiny. We may take, for instance, Fedor's reference to "von Sohn," a murder victim in St. Petersburg. (12) When Fedor spins out the story that von Sohn was murdered and resurrected, and is now Maksimov, we suddenly realize that unbeknownst to himself he has just completed a prophetic travesty of his own death: in the novel this resurrected Maksimow is Fedor's double, and so, Fedor was also von Sohn. It is then a sad fate for him who once said "люблю остроумие," to be continued in this world as witless lecher and fool and also, through the name von Sohn, to become a figure no less grotesque than his own inventions: a murdered father who is somehow also his own son; the father and the son of lies. (13)

Many readers have noted Ivan's skillful use of literary allusions in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.(14) Ivan's artistry goes further than that, for he also creates a balanced pattern of

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internal cross-references between his preliminary descriptions of crimes against children and the Legend itself which then extend to may points in the novel as a whole. The resulting network of symbolic references produces an implicit text of great ironic power pertaining not only to the moral and metaphysical issues of the book, but also to the image of Ivan as man and artist.(15)

Ivan says to Aleša that he began their conversation "as stupidly as possible," the way "Russian boys" are apt to talk about God. Ivan's design, however, is far from stupid, because in using the term "boys" he creates a relationship of equivalence between himself and Aleša and the suffering children in the newspaper stories,(16) thus achieving a tragic personal relevance of his metaphysical rebellion to the concrete dilemma of the Karamazov brothers vis-a-vis their father. In this context, Ivan's poem, together with the preliminaries to it, becomes a form of personal agony without redemption witnessed by Ivan in the mirror of his own self-image. Robert Lord, in his Dostoevsky. Essays and Perspectives aptly quotes Makar Ivanovič from The Raw Youth to describe Ivan's condition: ''Some have been all through the sciences, and are guilty in a state of dread" (Lord, p. 230). Lord then further notes: "Kierkegaard was nevertheless convinced that, despite its dangers, Dread is an adventure which every man has to confront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known Dread or by sinking under it. There is no character of any importance in Dostoevsky who is not assailed by Dread: Raskolnikov face to face with his crossexaminer or with Svidrigajlov; Myškin's anxiety taking the form of Rogozhin; Ivan Karamazov caught between his ideas, his halfbrother and his half-hallucination" (ibid.). The Legend, then, is an artistic realization of this Dread. In this relation to art, Ivan may well also see himself as the tortured horse in the poem by Nekrasov he refers to, whipped to frenzy by his own cruel sense of injustice, unable to carry the terrible cross of his own revolt. The grotesque agony of Nekrasov1s pitiful victim of inhuman rage (17) is also the condition of Ivan's soul, or the ultimate message of his artistic text, his "поэмка" about the Inqusitor.

The darkness deepens when Ivan refers to the apocrypha "Хождение Богородицы по мукам," remembering particularly the sinners whom "even God forgot" and no doubt realizing that this makes them resemble the little girl forgotten in the outhouse by parents and by God. One might add that before this Dostoevsky's narrator had already extended Ivan's frame of reference beyond the immediate argument here by letting us know ( Полное..., Х1У, 11) that Fedor hardly remembered his son Dmitrij, and abandoned Ivan as well. If we regard this from the perspective of a possible implicit structure in which Fedor is the kind of father figure that God may be, then his forgetfulness becomes a commentary on God's forgetting not only the sinners but all mankind, as evidenced by His permitting meaningless evil. When in the apocrypha the sinners sing God's praises for having received a "day's vacation" from hell, the very absurdity of their gratitude echoes against that child's piteous prayer and thus underlines the ironic pain and anger of Ivan's rejection of God's universal design, his substitution for it of the bitterly mocking text of his own.

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In Ivan's Legend, the fiction that Christ has come in "infinite pity," even against His own promise to return only for the Last Judgment, when juxtaposed with the previous claim that in fact God does not care, becomes a deliberate absurdity. There is even the possibility that Christ's second visit was invented by Ivan in order to present God as a kind of "actor," or an "artist," who pretends to love humanity in order to get a special kick out of His indifference to it. Further, the desperate pleas of the Legend's mother begging Christ to resurrect her child acquire, in Ivan's design, the hollow sound of lies as we remember the real mother of the child in the outhouse sleeping through her daughter's moans. Structurally, the outhouse is the equivalent of Christ's prison cell, and the girl's prayers echo against the Inquisitor's unctuous rhetoric while her excrementsmeared mouth haunts the kiss of Christ.(18) It is probably not irrelevant in this context of Ivan's great existential anguish to think of such spaces also in terms of a monk's or scholar's cell, or even the mother's womb, because they all enclose the anguished birth of human thought, faith and solitude.

We will remember also that Ivan starts his revolt with the tales of "Иоанн милостивый" who embraced a rotten beggar and kissed "гноящийся от какой-то ужасной болезни рот его." This network of ironic structural correspondences shows Ivan's great skill and subtlety in the enterprise of torturing God in his own soul as an esthetic exercise. This view of Ivan's Legend and of the preliminaries to it does in a sense run counter to the opinion of W. J. Leatherbarrow, who maintains that:

"But the important thing about Velikiy Inkvizitor is that it is the product of Ivan's intellect, not his aesthetic sense. He thinks it up, and it is not without significance that, as he confesses to Alyosha, he has not been able to write it, to give it aesthetic form."(19)

Whether or not it is written down, Ivan's tale has clearly been structured to create correspondences and associations that are meant to produce upon Aleša (and on us, readers) precisely the effect expected of a work of art. At least two scholars, Robert Jackson and Robert Lord, have observed that even Ivan's oral delivery is marked by stylistic features characteristic of written texts. Robert Lord notes:

Ivan Karamazov addresses his brother as if he were delivering a lecture, or composing a short memoir. The 'monographic' measure is almost entirely lost in translation. The phrases and sentences fall into familiar moulds; with the style of the Russian mid-nineteenth century intelligentsia - Herzen, Chernyshevsky and Belinsky - as the model (Dostoevsky, p. 210).

Jackson remarks upon Ivan's opening lines that they constitute a true "lament," with all the devices and strict formal organization of the genre:

This passage in Russian, with its curious rocking, singsong rhythms, its repetitions and alliterations, establishes the sound pattern of Ivan's lamentation. It is remarkable in the way its formal structure expresses its ideas and tensions.(20)

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Be that as it may, what ultimately emerges is a pitiful selfimage of Ivan as а "подлец, любящий слог," best described in what Ivan says about the cruelties of the Turks, that only a human can be "так артистически, так художественно жесток."(21)

Dmitrij is often thought to be the greatest poet among the Karamazovs; Robert Lord once even compared his language to Puškin's.(22) Unlike with Puškin, however, the great poem that is Dmitrij's life seems to issue from a sort of inspired incoherence: (23) he creates himself out of grand rhetorical notions and romantic literary references, of symbols from Greek antiquity, of non-sequiturs and wrong quotations, and of sentences that stumble deliriously from his mouth in a sort of dionysiac disorder.(24) Like his father, Dmitrij has the great theatrical gift of "исступление"  - the wild abandon of the soul at the meeting point of chaos and artistic design, and it is precisely against the background of Fedor's enthusiastic travesties of truth that we become most intensely aware of Dmitrij's profound and poetic devotion to it.

In a number of ways, Dmitrij seems to function in the novel as a euphoric counterpart to Ivan's nihilistic romanticism. Both are great lovers of Schiller's melodramatic verbal gestures, only Ivan generally uses them to emphasize alienation and rejection, as when he says to Katerina: "den Dank, Dame, begehr ich nicht" (and with good reason, considering what he knows about Katerina's deadly gratitude to Dmitrij), while Dmitrij seeks exclamatory affirmations of human nobility: "Будь человек .благороден,"  even if, in this case, he does get his Schiller and Goethe mixed up.(25) On a broader scale, we may note that even Dmitrij's narratives sometimes function as mirror images to those by Ivan. For instance, his confessions to Aleša have a certain resemblance to Ivan's great rebellion where Aleša is also a listener. Both Ivan and Dmitrij move between poetry and anecdote, creating points of comparison which suggest that the story of Katerina's shame could well be read as an equivalent of Ivan's tales about the agony of tortured children, while Schiller's "Ode to Joy" could stand in a relationship of counterpoint and ironic similarity to the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, an ode to despair.

A poet like his brother and a great actor like his father, Dmitrij differs from them both in that his artistry shows him to be not so much a maker of texts as as a companion of poets and a wellspring of poetry itself. To take an example, Dmitrij's peculiar calm sadness as he talks to Fenja, thinking himself a murderer and planning suicide, its intensely poetic of itself, as a mood of tragic romanticism, and its poetry is intensified by the presence in Dmitrij's thoughts of Hamlet's "poor Yorick" and of Puškin's Pimen:"еще одно, последнее сказание," with the unspoken subtext: "и летопись закончена моя," ironically prophetic to Dmitrij of his own impending death. He is equally poetic in his moments of excitement, as in the garden, when he describes his feelings to Aleaa: "Испытывал ты, видал ты во сне, как в яму с горы падают? Ну, так я теперь не во сне лечу. И не боюсь, и ты не бойся.  То есть, боюсь, но мне сладко. То есть не сладко, а восторг..." (26)  The seeming non-sequitur, "Восхвалим природу!" suddenly gives a wide, indeed cosmic dimension to Dmitrij's feelings and thus reveals his profoundly romantic poetic conception

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of both nature and human existence as permeated with terror and rapture. This holy and fearful beauty of nature and of all things in it surrounds and pierces Dmitrij's soul at every critical point of his life. Ultimately, one feels in him a sense of awe and wonder before God's world achieved through the instinctive knowledge that everything in it is really a poem. This feeling in itself is an effective counterpoint and answer to Ivan's and Fedor's despair.

And then there is Dostoevsky, building ironical texts - counterpoints beyond Dmitrij's poetic texts, rather like he does with Fedor and Ivan. Let us take for instance Puškin's line: "И только шепчет тишина" that wells up from somewhere in Dmitrij's mind just as he sits astride the fence to Fedor's garden, not quite knowing if he is going to be a murderer or not. Dmitrij may not realize, but Dostoevsky certainly does, how aptly, even if distorted, this line reverberates among the parallels and contrasts between Dmitrij's situation and that of Ruslan, fighting desperately for Ljudmila at the very moment when the evil Черномор (or is it Черномазов?) comes to her, his captive, in the middle of the night.

Aleša's imagination is literal and pure, like a poet's is, or should be,(27) and he does have the poet's clairvoyance, the ability to think and feel himself into another person's soul. This means of course that Aleša, the "человеколюбец," can suffer like Dostoevsky himself did when the tragedy of his characters unfolded to his imagination, and that he has the same sort of moral-prophetic vision. Perhaps then, looking at Dostoevsky as if he were Aleša, we can understand something more about him as an artist. But can Aleša himself be truly called an artist?

To be an artist in a more direct sense is to be a creator of texts, even when these are realized as relationships among textes created by others. In this sense, Aleša himself seems like the embodiment of an all-embracing subtext underlying the novel's narrative. The term "subtext" is used here in an opposite but nevertheless complementary manner to its use by David K. Danow.(28) Danow contends that "certain narrative portions of the text [the novel - R.S.] may be isolated according to a specific fixed schema, or model, and analyzed in relation to the greater narrative of which they are a part" (p. 174). For him:

Every idea finds its dramatization on some level of the novel, either as part of the primary plot, or as a subtext displaced from the principal story of the novel to a secondary level or narration, or as a dream (Dmitrij: "The Babe"), vision (Aleša: "Cana of Galilee"), or hallucination (Ivan Fedorovič's Nightmare. "The Devil") - all of which function to encapsulate the greater concerns of the novel in some smaller form, highly distinct as narrative units within the overall plot (p. 189).

The texts created by the Karamazovs are considered here to belong to Danow1s subtextual entities and to relate to the whole of the novel in the same way. We have spoken of the scandalous comedy-drama composed by Fedor Karamazov in Zosima's cell. To take another example, Fedor's conversation with Aleša about the

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"hooks" in hell is a finely-tuned masterpiece of irony and self-mockery, defiance and terror, suffused with fatherly love so deeply profaned that in the end it does touch the heart. The counterpart to the Legend, Ivan's conversation with the Devil, while it may be hallucination, is also an artistic text very skillfully composed by the devil and therefore, of course, by Ivan, or his "double." Dmitrij's "Confessions" certainly are artistic texts in all their essentials; with more space, it would be interesting to analyze them as such.

Against all this, Aleša is himself a "subtext," in the sense that he is conceived, though in the novel not yet fully realized by Dostoevsky, to be a wide and open force-field of love, "человеколюбие" which contains the ultimate moral, indeed, sacral meaning of all the parts and subtexts of the novel in relation to each other and to the whole. He is like a vessel, or a temple, an intimate and hallowed sanctuary in the mind, where all the troubled poets and actors, rebels and sufferers, and even sentimental villains like his father, can enter and shed their tragic and comic masks. In this special sense Aleša is what the artistry of the other Karamazovs ultimately may strive for even when clamoring for damnation. We might then say that Aleša's artless-ness resembles what Lotman called a "minus-device": it implies anunderlying text of faith and hope over the novel's entire spectacle of suffering and despair. From this perspective and insofar Aleša does indeed function as a messenger of hope, he is also the creator of this text, an artist.

It is also true, on the other hand, that Aleša does prepare a written text, Zosima's memoirs, and to the degree that he structures them he, Alesa, also becomes what the memoirs mean. One might after all say that if Fedor, Ivan and Dmitrij function as artists at least in part by means of establishing particular relationships among the various texts they refer to explicitly :0r implicitly, then Aleša also is such an artist with respect to Zosima's life which was, as Dostoevsky said in the title for this chapter. "составлено с собственных слов его Алексеем Карамазовым". Dostoevsky himself seemed to regard not Aleša but Zosima as the vehicle of his ideas in this segment when he wrote in a letter:

You will understand that a great deal in the precepts of my Zosima (or, rather, the manner of their expression) belongs to his character, that is, to the artistic presentation of his character (Koteliansky, p. 93).

Yet, one may still say that the vehicle by means of which Dostoievsky developed the presentation of Zosima's character was Aleša -at the very least, he functions here as a second narrator, a counterpart to the shadowy, facetious "official" narrator of the ; novel who seems somehow to be a little like some poor imitation ;of a Fedor Karamzov, but is a storyteller just the same. It is s interesting to see that much of what Zosima has presumably told Aleša is also shaped as stories composed with the help of various .artistic devices, just as Ivan's stories were, or those of the Uunderground Man. Nina Perlina considers the novel's narrator to be a hagiographer (p. 81), but in a very real sense Aleša is one as well. This crucial significance of Aleša becomes very clear |when we remember that for Dostoevsky that particular segment of

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the novel represented his great answer to Ivan's rebellion.

A broader question would be whether or not the other characters in the novel are also artists in their own right. After all, for instance, Smerdjakov is a singer and a guitarist, perhaps no worse than some in a rock band of today. Snegirev is a fine tragicomical actor, and Lise's vision of eating oompotte with a crucified child hanging on the wall before her is every bit as impressive as the real stories of torture Ivan has been telling. If we agree, at least for the sake of the argument, that they are artists, too, then we are really saying that while the depicted reality of life in Dostoevsky1s novel is really a structured reality of art, it is itself subordinate to the secondary structured reality of the Karamazovs1 texts. This could suggest, then, that the novel is really about art before it is about anything else - philosophy, theology or psychology. This may or may not be what Dostoevsky himself thought of it, but an author does not always have to be right in what he thinks of his creation, particularly if he is an artist of genius, himself the voice of life beyond his own knowledge, that is, the voice of art.

NOTES

1. Ф.М. Достоевский, Полное собрание сочинений в тридцати томах.  Ленинград, Академия наук СССР, XIV, р. 368.  All page references in the present paper are from this edition.
2. Robert Louis Jackson, in the preface to his Dostoevsky 's Quest for Form. A Study of His Philosophy of art,, Physsardt, 1978, p. 21, makes the crucial point that: "One of the recurrent and fundamental thoughts in Dostoevsky's writing is that life itself is a whole art and that to live means to make an artistic work out of oneself," quoting also from Dostoevsky to the effect that "man does not live his whole life, but composes himself."
3. Robert Lord notes in his Dostoevsky. Essays and Perspectives, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970, p. 202: "It is still seldom realized that Dostoevsky never set out to become a philosopher, but instead used the material of philosophy and ideas to construct the mental and spiritual worlds of his characters."
4. Lev Shestov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche, Bernard Martin and Spencer Roberts, translators. Ohio University Press, 1969, p. 144.
5. Robert Lord: "Man enacts the roles he finds it necessary to enact. The more individual he is, the more likely he is to play a variety of parts and to precipitate action in a real-life plot. The more conscious he is of his own individuality, the greater the likelihood that he will either shut himself off (like the Man from Underground) or project himself as his own double," p. 204.
6. Xalina Bžoza, Поэтика как средство изложения содержания и метода философии /к характеристике творчества Достоевского/,"
    

   
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    Russian Literature, XI (1982), 373.
7. Dostoevsky, Полное..., XIV, 7.
8. These strange figures might be one more manifestation of what Xalina Bžoza calls Dostoevsky's "scandalous model of the world":

   Стоит заметить, что в романе этого писателя выразилось своеобразная поэтическая феноменология трагедии человеческого бытия, "алогичная логика" которой [just as in Goqol' - R. Š.] - внутренне противоречивая - проявилась в дисгармоничной и "скандальной" модели мира, наполненной разными символами и различными вариантами их интерпретаций. (Bžoza, pp. 372-3)

9. Regarded against the structure of the entire novel, this Diderot and the scandalous dinner constitute one member of the moral and metaphysical equation of which the other is the wedding at Cana seen by Aleša in his dream.
10. Robert Lord calls this rejoinder by Fedor "a master stroke": "The deep integrity of Zosima momentarily sounds priggish in this particular context. Our sympathies switch to the old roué who for an instant overtops the saint." See Lord, p. 229. It is, of course, a mockery of the sacrament of confession and repentance performed with an artistic flourish.
11. Fedor's mockery might well extend to future critics of the novel, such as Lev Sestov who remarked upon "hysterical" passages in Dostoevsky as moments when the would-be prophet lost his own faith and tried to cover this up: "As soon as you detect hysteria, unusually high notes, and an unnatural cry in Dostoevsky1s speech, you can conclude that an "annotation" is beginning. Dostoevsky does not believe his own words, and he is trying to replace a lack of faith with "feeling and eloquence" (Lev Šestov, p. 145). The mock eloquence of Fedor, his well controlled mock-hysteria seem almost specially designed to make fun of such critics as Šestov.
12. See Victor Terras, A Karamazov Companion. Commentary on the Genesis, Language and Style of Dostoevsky's Novel. Madison: the University of Wisconsin Press, 1981. p. 143.
13. Fedor is so constructed that he could well himself appreciate this sort of mockery and paradox. We may remember his broadening filthy grin when he suddenly realizes he had been thinking that Ivan, his "great intellectual" son might have been the son of Lizaveta Smerdjaščaja. Полное собрание..., XIV, 125.
14. See, for instance, the very informative study by Ralph E. Matlaw: "The Brothers Karamazov. Novelistic Technique." Mussagetes. Contributions to the History of Slavic Literature and Culture. Dmitrij Čiževskij, editor. Mouton, 1957, pp. 5-44.
15. It is also clear that Ivan's larger text is further extended
    
     

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    by Dostoevsky himself to create additional ironic juxtapositions. Ivan's insistence that explanation for the suffering of the innocent children must be given "now," because they have already been subjected to it much resembles the cry of the peasant woman who lost her child and would not be consoled because: только здесь-то, с нами-то его теперь, Никитушки, нет" /Полное. . . , Х1У, 46/.
16. At this point one might also remember that while still a student, Ivan wrote little articles to make a living, about events "on the street," perhaps rather in the style of "the natural school." In view of the fact that Ivan told AleSa he took examples of cruelties directly as facts from news papers, there is a certain interplay between what is real and what Ivan has constructed as texts that repeats in miniature the artist-suffering person interplay in the novel. These articles then must relate to Ivan's other writings, the article about Church and State, in the manner in which the newspaper facts relate to the Inquisitor legend. One is a commentary upon the other. One could also add that Ivan's little articles constitute a link between him and the Man from Underground who also very artistically told true little stories in order to lacerate the heart of an innocent ("картинками ее надо!"). In both cases, self-laceration in good literary form is the ultimate purpose.
17. See Nekrasov, "О погоде. 11, До сумерек," Н.А. Некрасов. Избранные произведения,  Moscow, 1966, I, 187:

    Под жестокой рукой человека,

    Чуть жива, безобразно тоща,

    Надрывается лошадь-калека,

    Непосильную нощу влача.

    Вот она зашаталась и стала.

    "Hyl" - погонщик полено схватил

    /Показалось кнута ему мало/ -

    И уж бил ее, бил ее, бил!

    Ноги как-то расставив широко,

    Вся дымясь, оседая назад,

    Лошадь только вздыхала глубоко

    И глядела...

    And so on. Needless to say, Raskol'nikov's dream also goes back to the same horse and the same dilemma of impossible moral burden engendered by the insulted sense of justice.

18. It is clear from Dostoevsky's correspondence that he wanted to obtain maximum emotional poignancy from this episode. In his letter to N.A. Ljubimov, associate editor of "Русский вестник", Dostoevsky points out a propos of the word "excrement": "it can't be softened, it would be a great pity to do so. Surely we are not writing for children of  ten" (S.S. Koteliansky, trans. New Dostoevсky Letters. Haskell House Publishers, 1974, p. 84). This remark about "children of ten" acquires its own ironic tinge in view of Ivan's talk about "Russian boys."
19. W.J. Leatherbarrow, "The Aesthetic Louse: Ethics and Aesthetics in Dostoevskyжs 'Prestupleniye i nakazaniye'." Modern Language Journal, Vol. 71, No. 4, October, 1976, p. 866.




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20. Robert Louis Jackson, The Art of Dostoevsky. Deliriums and Nocturnes. Princeton University Press, 1981. p. 325.
21. In Dostoevsky's Quest for Form Robert Jackson notes Dostoevsky's own comment on the "Underground Man" type which seems to fit Ivan Karamazov as well:
    I am proud that I was the first to bring forward the real man of the Russian majority and the first to expose his disfigured and tragic side. The tragedy consists in the consciousness of disfiguration. ... Only I brought out the tragedy of the underground, consisting in suffering, in self-punishment, in the consciousness of something better and in the impossibility of achieving it.
22. See Robert Lord, Dostoevsky. . ., p. 211:
    Dmitri is the poet, and his language is Pushkin's language. It is never difficult to set out Dmitri's speech in free verse form, for it is the finest poetic diction.
23. Albeit, as Nina Perlina claims (Varieties of Poetic Utterance. Quotation in The Brothers Karamzov. Lanham, Md. University Press of America, 1985, p. 164), that the poetic word of Pushkin is for Dostoevsky "an ideal stylistic paragon," If it is, then the difference between the two artists: Dostoevsky and Dmitrij, becomes all the more evident.
24. Nevertheless, Dmitrij's speech reaches out and connects through its literary references with the "performances" of both Ivan and Fedor. We know, as Perlina also points out, (p. 50) about the skillful and perverse use of literary quotations and references in Fedor's speech: "He creates a whimsical mosaic of quotations, direct and hidden, decent and obscene, travestied and reaccented." Most importantly, the main forensic performances of all three belong to the genre of "confession": Fedor plays the fool while pretending to bare his soul, Dmitrij performs his "confessions of the ardent heart," and Ivan's scholarly and poetic discourse, is really a great confession of despair to Aleša.
25. More exactly, Dmitrij is aware of his confusion, for he asks: "Кто это написал?" This is part of a pattern in which Dmitrij's mind moves through something like a fog of poetic memory, where discrete texts blend in unexpected ways to create new meanings and references while also contributing to an aura of mystery about their origin.
26. Полное..., XIV, 97. Nina Perlina, p. 166, considers these words to be indirect borrowings from Puškin's Boris Godunov:  "И стыдно мне, и страшно становилось. И падая стремглав, я пробуждался, "and "Есть упоение в бою и бездны мрачной на краю."
27. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator presents Aleša to us as a "realist." However, as Robert Jackson observes, Dostoevsky equated the "realistic" with the "poetic," perhaps not unlike Pasternak later was to claim that poetry is prose in that in which it is real. Jackson's point is important here:
    
    

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    Dostoevsky's identification of realism with poetry implies, then, an infusion into reality of poetic inspiration, poetic idea and truth; it implies if not a moral transfiguration of  that  reality, then a focusing of that reality in a poetic (for Dostoevsky always moral-aesthetic) perspective (Jackson, Dostoevsky's Quest for  Form, p. 96).
    Aleša is a poet in precisely this way.
28. David K. Danow, "Subtexts of 'The Brothers Karamzov'," in: Russian, Croatian and Serbian. Czech and Polish Literature. XI-II, February, 1982, pp. 173-208.