The Brothers Karamazov and the Death of Ivan Ilyich
Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich examine the role that suffering plays in the transformation of a soul for better or for worse. Being a much longer work, Dostoevsky’s novel examines suffering from a number of different perspectives, giving a number of different outcomes—each depending on the will of the individual character, the psychological situation of that character, the character’s faith, and so on. Tolstoy takes a narrower focus by looking at how the suffering of one character changes the person’s mental state—and how the suffering of his caretaker gives him a window of grace to truly transform his soul and get it ready for judgment on the other side of the grave. This paper will compare these two works and show how suffering and the transformation of a person are linked by the extent to which the individual views that suffering as having a salvific purpose.
Suffering poses its own qualities in each of the two Russian works. Dostoevsky shows how suffering weighs on the body and mind—how characters choose to run away from it or embrace. Ivan views suffering as an unnecessary and unexplainable evil that no good God would allow, which is why he is an atheist. His view prevents him from seeing the evil in himself, which Smerdyakov, who delights in evil, identifies and confesses as being a source of inspiration for the murder of Fyodor Karamazov. Smerdyakov being the illegitimate son of Fyodor and half-brother of Ivan, Alyosha and Dmitri—though unrecognized as kin by any of them—has a grotesqueness about him that represents some abject form of perfidy. His suffering is both physical (epilepsy) and mental and spiritual (he has a kind of twisted, malformed soul, represented by the joy he takes in hanging cats as a child and which could be linked to his having no legitimate father and a half-wit for a mother). Smerdyakov is likened to a contemplator by Dostoevsky: one who routinely comes under the spell of some impression and “is most likely storing them up imperceptibly and even without realizing it—why and what for, of course, he does not know either; perhaps suddenly, having stored up his impressions over many years, he will drop everything and wander off to Jerusalem to save his soul, or perhaps he will suddenly burn down his native village, or perhaps he will do both” (Dostoevsky 127). Smerdyakov’s impressions are of a foul sort and they compel him ultimately to commit patricide. Following his confession of his crime to Ivan, he hangs himself. Ivan, shocked and dismayed that Smerdyakov should recognize a kinship between them (as they are both atheists—but also because they both appear to delight in rejecting the source of all that is good—God), refuses to believe Smerdyakov’s confession, partly because he refuses to believe that he had any complicity in it (and Smerdyakov assures him that he did). Ivan spends the novel mainly resting on his laurels of logic—Enlightened Man who has no need of salvation from a God who would allow an innocent child to suffer. It is not this that really moves Ivan to renounce God but rather his own anger and bitterness, his own pride and resentment—for if he had the least bit humility he would see that God gives freedom of will to all to exercise to their betterment or detriment and, ultimately, gives them the grace to seek their betterment should they but choose to do so. Having rejected the giving hand, Ivan sets himself up for internal, psychological and spiritual suffering, which drives him to madness.
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