Word and Image in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov: From an AnaIysis of the Dialectic in the Novel to an Interpretation of Dostoevsky's Confrontation with Hans Holbein the Younger's The Bodv of the Dead Christ in the Tomb

Jeff GatralI

Comparative Literature

Facul ty of Arts

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Facul ty of Graduate Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario Aupst, 1997

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In this thesis, a dialectical approach that responds to the dialectic in The Brothers Karamazov is developed. This dialectical approach is inspired by and situates itszlf in relation to Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevskfs Poetics, Theodor W. Adorno's Negative Dialectics, and Max Horkheimer's and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. Throughout the thesis, the relationships between the dia1ectic of belief, the dialectic of enlightenrnent, modem representation, word and image are explored. In the first chapter, "Word," an analysis of the aesthetic form the dialectic assumes in the novel leads to an elucidation of the dialectics of realist representation. In the second chapter, "Image," the dialectic of be1ief is retated to the problem of divine representation. There is a comparative emphasis between Dostoevsky's dialectic and dialectics in the German philosophicai tradition and, more specifically, between Dostoevsky' s images and Hans Holbein the Younger's painting The Bodv of the Dead Christ in the Tornb. Acknowledgments

In one of his short stories, Chekhov compares ideas with the shirnrnenng lights of the campfires of railway workers. Each Bame fi eetingly illuminates the steppe before disappeanng into the night sky. Ideas lighten not oniy the lonely room of the mind's contempIation, but flicker in that fragile space between those huddling close in the night. But perhaps this metaphor of the idea as a shirnmering fiame is too sentimental for a thesis concemed with Dostoevsky's critique of Eniightenment thought. Professor Reuel Wilson's knowledge of Dostoevsl+ life and work and his insights on The Brothers Karamazov have been very helptùl. Professor Angela Esterhammer's support and advice by e-mail from Berlin provided me with a much needed link to the University of Western Ontario's Comparative Literature Program while 1was working in Moscow. 1 would also like to thank Professor Calin Mihailescu for introducing me to Horkheimer's and Adorno's Dialectic of Enliehtenment and to Kristeva's essay on Holbein. It was durinç Our discussions of these two texts that the major comparative emphasis in this thesis between Dostoevsky and German philosophy and art was first conceived. Dunng an extensive e-mail correspondence with Dan Mellamphy, many difficult ideas on the relationships between kenosis, beauty, compassion and suffering were worked through. In addition to searching for matenal in London, Ontario that I could not find in Moscow, Dan Mellamphy and Nancy Bray were always willing to share their ideas and to listen patiently to my concems about the thesis. Table of Contents Page -. Certificate of examination 11 .. . Abstract LI1 Acknowledgments iv Table of contents v Instead of an Introduction: Towards a Dialectical Approach to The Brothers Karamazov 1 I Word "Vse porvoleno" and "vse ru vsekh virtovaîy": The Semantics of Plot 13 Origin of the Dialectic in The Brothers Karamazov: A Formal Approach 4 1 2 Image The Divine and the Limits of Representation 62 Aesthetic Distance and the Image of the Kenotic Christ 99 Works Cited 129 Vita 134 In memory of Trene Gatrall Kunrtrnuseum . St. Alban-Graben 76 Offantliche Kunstsammlung Museum MI C3egernMlrtskun.t Baset St- Alban-Rheinweg 60

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vii i Instead of an Introduction: Towards a Dialectical Approach to The Brothers Karamazov

Dunng Ivan Karamazov's nightmare on the eve of his brother's triai, the Devil reIates to Ivan a legend about a thinker and philosopher who, having repudiated the afterlife while alive, refùsed "on principle" to begin his afterlife punishment of a quadrillion kilometre walk to the gates of heaven. Ivan, &er listening to the legend, "catches" the devil, fervently explaining that he himself had composed this legend at the age of seventeen. Ivan repudiates, to the Devil hirnself, the Devil's independent existence. The Devil insists that he told Ivan his own story on purpose:

If the Devil, a "banal devil [nournbrii qep~]"(2 358) and a "hanger-on ~pi.rmki~anb~~~]"(2 345), sets himself the "noble goal" of planting a seed of faith in God through doubt, then Dostoevsky exploits the "new method" of his Devil and double in the composition of The Brothers Karamazov. DostoevsS, himself suggests such a cornparison between himselfand his Devil in his preparatory notes for a polemic with the critic Kavelin: The inquisitor and the chapter about children. In view of these chapters you could at Ieast regard me although scientifically, not so arrogantly in the area of philosophy, even thoush philosophy may not be my specialty. Even in Europe such force of atheistic expressior~does not now exist rior did it ever. Accordingly, it is not like a child that 1believe in him and profess faith in hiin, but rather, the hu.scr,urcr

-- pp i "1 am altemately leading you between belief and disbelief. and here 1 have n.iy own goal. It's a new mehod: after al1 when you have completely lost your belief in me. bediately ?ou \vil1 start to persuade me to my face that 1 am not a dream and that I reall>-eSist. for I alread?. ho\v >.ou well; then 1 will have reached rn). goal. And my goal is a noble one. I tvill throu- onl?. a tiny seed of belief at you, and fiom it an O& tree tvill grow - and such an oak tree, that you. sitting on that oak will want to enrol nlth the herrnits and the chaste woman in the desert; because -ou secretly want this very much. You will be eating locusts and \vil1 drag yourseif to the desert to become saved!" (Trans. Magarshack 2 759). Udess othenvise indicated, translations ftom Russian texts are mine. has corne through the grmt crircible of dozrbl, as the devil says in that same novel of mine. (The Unpublished Dostoevsky 175) This dialectic of belief not ody iies at the center of the novel's broader dialectic but permeates its aesthetic form. While the characters, readers and author suffer the question of belief in the existence of God, the novel's discourse beIies the verbal wasteland of this dialectic. The path to God that Dostoevsky draws in The Brothers Karamazov is always also a path to atheism. Between the portraits of suffering children in Ivan's "Rebellion" and the beauty of the image of Christ in his "Grand Inquisitor," between Fyodor's carnivalesque word that defiles everything beautifid it touches and Zosima's Iyrical celebration of active, living love, the novel's words and images aesthetically rnimic the dialectic of belief. If in The Brothers Karamazov the possibility of singing "hosannah remains less a reward after the passage through the "crucible of doubt" (the Devil decides, in fact, not to sing his "hosamah" 2 359) than a source of hope and anguish for those still bleeding within it, then the Word, who appears only once in the novel and in silence, can only be hlly animated by the negative light of the novel's demythologized word. Nevertheless, ifthe Devi1 is Dostoevsky's double, then the former's dialectic of belief pivots much more than the latter's on the Enlightenment question of material proofs for the existence of God. Whereas the Devil admits that he is a hallucination and excuses his own doubts about God (whom he physically sees) through recouse to Descartes' "Je pense donc je suis" (2 353, Dostoevslq in The Brothers Karamazov modulates the dialectic of belief through epistem~logical~moral, sociological and psychological categories. The Devilts revelation to Ivan of the secret that "everything that you have. we have also" (superstition, gossip, kilornetres, merchant's wives 2 3 54) parodies througli anthropocentric reification Dostoevsky's tragic portrayal of the disintegration of the man- God who attempts to replace God by destroying the idea of God. Frorn Notes from Undergound to The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky refiacts the Enlightenment through the dialectic of enlightenment. If "Nietzsche was one of the few afier Heçel who recojnized the dialectic of enlightenment," as Horkheimer and Adorno contend in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (44). then an analysis of this dialectic in The Brothers Karamazov simultaneously. if indirectly, traces Dostoevsky's relation to this German genealogy. In a way that problematizes a purely empirical study of influence, Dostoevslq exploited his status as both enlightened European and Onhodox Russian to deepen philosophically the cnsis of Enlightenment thought inherited &om Kant and Hegel as he provided an aesthetic response to this crisis in the image of the Russian Christ, "the star [who] shines f7om the East" (1 384). Zosima's idea that the Russian people alone have preserved the image of Christ mimics Hegel's assertion that "the destiny of the Germanic peoples is to be the bearers of the Christian principle" (Philosophv of History 88.89) even as it replaces Hegel's imageless principle with the image of Christ. This image of the Christ itseif is nevertheless fùlly aesthetic and Dostoevslq intertextually depends on and esplicitly affirms the genius of European art in order to draw this image? Dostoevsky's aesthetic response

'Dostoevsky's privileging of art over philosophy is also fdt by hs virtual silence concrming tus Gennan philosophicai sources. It is generally acknowledged that Dostoevsky was riri avid reader. but critical attempts to discover lines of influence leading fiom Kant or Hegel to Dostoevsiq- encounter the paradox that although Dostoevslq seems to be very hniliar with their thought there is no conclusive evidence that he ever read a word of either of their works. As he was leaving Siberia in 1854, Dostoevsky asked his brother Mikhail in a letter to send him copies of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Hegel's The Philosophv of Historv (15 93). Dostoevsicy's close friend Strakhov \\;rites that he was given this copy of The Phiioso~hvof Historv and that it "rernained unread'' (in Jackson 185). Certainly the wefldocurnented influence of Hegel among the Russian inrellegentsiia in the 1840's could have provided Dostoevsky tvith extensive, secondhand knowledge of the Gerrnan philosopher's wituigs. Kant's case is more problematic since he did not achieve the cult status that Hegel did in Russia and since iiis idluence seems morc pervasivt: than Hegel's in Dostoevsky's last novel. in his study Dostoevskv and Kant. Golosovker suggests that the chapter title "Kontroverza ~o~~posep3a]"and the recurring word "kritik [K~MTI.IK]''in The Brothers Kararnazov are taken fiom the Critique of Pure Reason (34,41). He also notes similarities benveen Kant's staternent that the antithesis side of Kant's antinomies of reason promises the tvidening of knowledge "wvithout end [ohne Ende]" and the Devil's suggestion to Ivan that "one could conquer \vithout boundaries [Ge3 rpas~s]nature by one's ni11 and science" (50). Alexandra Lyngstad's suggestion Dostoevsky knew Kant's ideas only tiirough Schiller tvould thus seem to marginalize the exrent of this iduence (24 n2), but Golosovker's brief linguistic anatysis of Kantian teminology in the The Brothers Karamazov is not entirely persuasive even. it ~vould seem, to Golosovker himself, whose study gains its best iiisights on Kant's influence precise1'- b>- ignoring the problem of influence per se. Furthemore. if Schiller is Dostoevsk>-'sbridge to Kant. then it is nevertheless not completel- clear tliat he read Scluller's works on aesthetics, a state of &airs that the word "almost" belies in Jackson's assertion that "it is alrnost certain that he rad Schiller's aesthetic and philosophical essays at an early date" (185). Sven Linnér's suggestion that "Dostoevsky does not appear to have rnentioned Schelling" even though Dostoevs~'~"fiend and colleague on the sMofVrernja, Apollon GRgor'ev. \vas a convinced Schellingian" (Starets Zosima 147, 148) crystaliizes the paradoxical results of traditional studies of influence. The possibility that much of Dostoevsky's knowIedge of Geman philosophy was gained in conversation to the Enlightenment is furthemore not an irrational retreat fiom philosophy. Rays of Enlightenment [npocseuien~e]flow fiom the eyes of Ivan's Christ (1 3 13). A critique of Enlightenment is not a renim to myth and superstition but an attempt to make good on the promises of a tme enlightenrnent. In the "Introduction" to their study Dialectic of Ediahtenment, Horkheimer and Adorno clari@ their enlightened intentions: We are wholly convinced - and therein lies ourpetztioprincipii - that social freedom is inseparable fiom enlightened thought. Nevertheless, we believe that we have just as clearly recognized that the notion of this very way of thinking, no less than the actual historïc forms - the sociai institutions - with which it is interwoven already contains the seed of the reversa1 universally apparent today. If enlightenment does not accommodate reflection on this recidivist element, then it seals its own fate. If consideration of the destructive aspect of progress is lefi to its enemies, blindly pragrnatized thought loses its transcending quality and: its relation to truth. (xiii) It may be argued that Dostoevsky, as a critic and polemicist, was precisely one of those "enemies" mentioned above who considered the appearance of the European Enlightenment on Russian soi1 only in negative terms. Indeed, enlightened critics have not been reluctant to expose the obscurities of Dostoevsky's thought. Instead of risking the peds of reflective thought, the Enlightenment condemns as charlatanism al1 that does not accept the truth of its democratic institutions and its science as "self-evident." An apology for Dostoevsky's critical thinking on the Enlightenment, one which attempted to demonstrate the breadth of vision in his dialectical mediation of the Westernizers' Enlightenment and the SlavophiIe critique of Western civilization, would likely encounter many inconsistencies in Dostoevsky's thought. In addition to the problems that his ofien chauvinistic attitude towards Jews and Poles would raise, such an apology would find rnuch less breadth of vision in his literary caricatures of non-Russians and in his personal attacks on such Westernizers as Turgenev, Belinsky and Nekrasov in his letters than in his public pronouncements in the Diary of a Writer. Beyond an apology for his public and private statements, a dialectical analysis of The Brothers Karamazov explores the possibility that Dostoevsky's cornmitment to a tnie enlightenment lies less in the content of his ideas than in his novels' form. If his aesthetics is permeated with the concems of with others might prove slightIy less problematic for a study of influence that incorporated Bakhtids dialogics. philosophy, then any interpretation of the ideas in his novels must first of all address the aesthetic form in which they appear. No analysis of the fom of the dialectic in Dostoevsky's novels. however. can avoid contending with the challenge Mkhail Bakhtin levels at such analyses. Ensagement wit h Bakhtin does not lead to a finalizinç, monologic negation of the relevance of dialogics for Dostoevsky studies. On the contrary, this engagement, even as it uncovers the dialectical accents in Bakhtin's own concepts and exposes the idealism in Bakhtin's critique of idealism, deepens a dialectical analysis of Dostoevslq's novels by explorhg its Iimits. Bakhtin's insight that the "unified, dialectically evolving spirit, understood in Hegelian ternis, cm give rise to nothing but a philosophical monologue" (Problems 26) indicts not only most philosophical analyses of Dostoevshy's novels but makes explicit his othenvise pervasive, implicit argument with Hegel. The monologism of what Bakhtin calls "monistic idealism" (26) is as much a consequence of such Hegelian superstructural concepts as "spirit" as the more systemic "coincidence of identity and positivity" that Adorno notes in Hegel's dialectic (Ne-qativeDialectics 141). Identity thinking strips language of its fùll heteroglossic Iife precisely because it transcends, or seeks to hide, thought's being in language. Rather than recognizing, as Bakhtin does, the presence of antinomy and dialectic in Dostoevsky's novels only in the "logical links within the limits of individual consciousnesses" (Problems 9, italics Bakhtin's), a broader analysis of the dialectic in The Brothers Karamazov that is informed by Adomo's critique of Hegel's "dialectics without a Iansuage" (Neqative Dialectics 163) would resist the monologic impulse by remaining within and responding to languageW3

;There are, of course, many equivocations in juxqaposing Adomo's non-identity thinking and Bakhtin's dialogics. Despite Bakhtin's md Adorno's cornrnon refusal to erase what the former calls the "histocy" ("Discourse in the Novel" 279) and the latter the "mythical remahder*-(in Rose 15) of words by defining them and the more general resonances behveen the fomer's historical connection behveen monologism and Enlightenrnent (Problems 82) and the latter's extensive critique of the Enlightement's reification of language, Bakhtin's celebration of the liviq density of the dialogic word in the novel cmot find as full an expression in the tex% of a philosopher IL-ho insists that %e can see through the identity principle, but we cannot think nithout identifiing-* (Neqative Dialectics 149). If Adomo's reworking of the traditional dichotomy of subject and object in Ne~ativeDialectics in 1966 occurs at about the same tirne as the "postmodem subject" emerses, then Bakhtin. whose Problems of Dostoevskv*~Poetics was originally published in 1929 and then reivritten for publication in the earlier sisties, can in manu ways be retrospectively Nthough Bakhtin daims to analyze Dostoevsky's novels only from the point of view of poetics (3)' his own study examines both the form that Dostoevsky's ideas assume in his novels and, with great caution under the hammer of a censorship more deadly than the one that had driven social critics of Dostoevsky's own generation to literature and literary criticism, the truth content of DostoevsIq's form. It is precisely a monological approach to the ideas in Dostoevsky's novels that is incapable of elucidating the enlightened form of their representation. From a monological point of view, the most devastating. single- voiced critique of Edightenment thought (and of Romanticism) in Dostoevsky's novels is found in the first section of Notes fiom Under.o;round. NevertheIess, to attribute monologically the Underground Man's well-argued irrationalism to the author himself not only misunderstands the dialogic relationship between the author and the character but ignores the dialectical mediation between form and content. Notes from Underground is a realist te-, as the author's footnote on the first page makes clear: "the author of these notes. of course, is fictitious. Nevertheless, such persons as the author of these notes not only can but even must exist in our society, taking into consideration the conditions under which Our society has formed" (4 452). Whereas the Underground Man develops the dialectic of enlightenment as he negates the utopian drearn of utilitarianism, this dialectic is

attributed with anticipating the postmodem subject. a comparison for whicli L am indebtzd to Calin MihaiIescu. The lack of referentiality irnplicit in Bakhtin's formulation of --discourse'-in Dostoevsky as a '-word about a word addressed to a word" (237) has strong resonances 1~1th postmodem discourse analysis, resonances that are higliiighted by Canl Ernerson's and Michael Holquist's translation of slovo as "discourse" instead of the more common translation. --word-'(Cf. Dialopic Imagination 427 for a discussion of this translation, one which is repeated in Cary1 Emerson3 translation of ProbIems of Dostoevskv's Poetics). The interpIay behveen modem and postmodem subjectivity within Bakhtin's own works tums on the problems that the notion of "polyphony." and especially "heteroglossia," present for his more traditionai concepts of --self- consciousness" and "representation." The bridge that leads from the latter concepts to dialectics cracks under the weight of the more postmodem "heteroglossia." Postmodem discourse analysis and Bakhtin's metalinguistics consider the problem of language beond the dialectical opposition of a representing subject and a represented object. Inasmuch as Bakhtin's dialogism is postmodem, or, to be more exact, inasmuch as diaiogism opens ont0 a metalinguistics that lies outside ofthe dialectics of the object, the full esqent of Bakhtin's challenge to a midy of dialectics that remains within traditional German philosophical categories cannot fdly be met from within such a study' even as that study heeds Bakhtin's critique of a monological approach to Dostoevsky's novels. also aesthetically engaged in the relationship between the realistic representation of the character's voice and the irrationalism expounded by the character hirnself Two dangers confront a dialectical approach to The Brothers Karamazov. Firstly, as Bakhtin's work implicitly demonstrates, to rehearse directly the ideas in Dostoevsky's novels without analyzing the forms these ideas assume avoids the critical rnediation between form and content. To choose a seminal work on Dostoevsky's dialectic, the non- dialectical moments in Nichoias Berdyaev's work Dostoevskv ofien result fiom his intention to "display Dosroevslojs spiritual side" at the expense of an analysis of poetics (11 A dialectics that closes in on itself threatens to become as ossified as the raw matter its task is to penetrate, for matter and, in a work of art, form continually renew thought by limiting it. Thus against his own insight that Dostoevsky's "conception of the world was in the highest degree dynamic" (G), Berdyaev considers the "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" in such static terms as "the constructive part of Dostoevsky's relijious ideas" and as an "extremely powefil vindication of Christ" and declares that "truth springs fiom the contradictions in the ideas of the Grand Inquisitor, it stands out clearly among al1 the considerations he marshals against it" (204, 188, 189). To note that the Grand Inquisitor's condemnation of Christ "cames the process of its own dissolution within itself" 1115) as a philosophical corrective to Berdyaev's philosophical approach would understate the profound semantic ambivalence of The Brothers Karamazov as a work of art. Dostoevsky may well be "a dialectician of çenius and Russia's greatest metaphysician" (1 l), but a semantic study of the novel's dialectic must ençage the problem of fom or transfonn the novel into a philosophical monologue. The second danger facing a dialectical approach to Dostoevsky's novels is the inverse of the first one. If a dialectical analysis that marginalizes form runs the danger of formalizing the content of the dialectic, then the problematics of formalism are even more acute for an analysis of the aesthetic forrn of Dostoevsky's dialectic. Discerning where and by what rules the dialectic fùnctions leads not only to the problem of the aesthetic

4 Against the dialecticians Berdyaev and Lukacs. who both assert that Dostoevskfs novels are not truiy novels (Berdyaev 2 1, Lukacs 152): Bakhtin demonstrates how Dostoevsky exploits the polyphonic potential of the novel in ways unrealized by his predecessors and contemporanes. conditions for the dialectic's appearance in The Brothers Karamazov, but at its limit runs the risk of formalizing the dialectic through a purely empirical or structural examination of its appearance. Here Adorno's comment that "dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of Iogic by its own means" (Minima Moralia 150) intersects with the monologue of the Underground Man in a methodologically instructive way, for if the Underground Man insists that it is "one's own willfül desire, one's own most wild caprice" that "is constantly flinging al1 systems and theories to the devif" (Notes from Underground 4 4701, then he himself Leaves systems of reason in ruins through the rage of his own dialectic. A dialecticai analysis that ignores the indelible human experience found within the language of characters who speak dialectically not only monologically findizes those characters but betrays the hl1 negative force of their dialectic. AIthough the dialectical approach in this thesis has in many ways been inspired by Adorno's "negative dialectic" and by Walter Benjamin's notion of the "dialectical image," the methodological emphasis on the dialectic is foremost a critical response to the dialectic in Dostoevsky's The Brother Karamazov. The novel's ideational content and aesthetic form dance at the threshold between belief and disbeiief, and the problems of theology. psychology, epistemology and aesthetics are dialectically clustered around this question of belief A dialectic approach attempts to preserve the dialectical play between these disparate categories of knowledge and, more importantly, to hold fast to that threshold between belief and disbelief without falling to either side. Without monologically rehearsing the ideas of the characters, without sapping its negative energy in a history of ideas, and without formalizing itseif'through a structural examination of the dialectic, a dialectical approach to Dostoevslq's The Brothers Kararnazov mirrors in its form the labyrinth of negation that the novel itself weaves. Neverthetess, a perfect mimesis between philosophy and art, or between criticism and literature, would pay for its perfection by succumbing to what Adorno calls "identity thinking" by merely inverting the Enliçhtenment hypostatization of art and philosophy. Although there is aesthetic play within the dialectic of this thesis, this play reflects the speculative moment of the process of thought and pales in cornparison with the aesthetic means of the novel as a genre. Furthemore, since the dialectic represents in many ways an anti-aesthetic element within The Brothers Karamazov, a dialectical approach to the novel even risks betraying that aesthetic. A dialectical analysis of The Brothers Karamazov mimics the negation in the novel only on the condition that it not reduce itself to art or fail to respond criticdly to the novel's aesthetic form. Ever since Hegel's "Preface" to the Phenornenolog of Mind, the inappropnateness of writing an introduction to a dialectical work has been expressed, for philosophy itself "expresse[s] the complete fact itself in its very nature ..." (67). In a comment on Hegel's method, Adorno even goes so far as to suggest that -'in a philosophical text ai1 the propositions ousht to be equaily close to the centre" (Minima Moralia 71). Dostoevsky himself sometirnes entitles the first sections of his articles, novellas and novels "hstead of an uitrod~ction."~In the 'ktead of an Introduction'' to this dialectical approach to Dostoevskfs The Brothers Karamazov. many of the critical terms and critical texts that appear in the main body of the thesis have been dialectically presented. The dialectic developed so far has not been written with the intention of stating propositions to be demonstrated later in the te.ut, nor does it represent an authoritative discourse hierarchically superior to later sections. Nevertheless, this thesis is foremost a work of literary criticism, not philosophy. Xthoush dialectics represents one of the methodologies employed in elucidating the dialectic within The Brothers Karamazov, other methodologies are aIso used, ranging from close analyses of specific passages to a broad, histoncal account of "representation" in Western thought. Furthemore, althoujh the key concepts "image, " "word," "representation." "dialect ic of belief' and "dialectic of enlightenrnent" emerge in each of the four sections of this study in different "configurations" (to borrow a term fiom Walter Benjamin), al1 four sections in the thesis have discernible narrative elements and can be viewed together as a targer narrative. In this larger narrative, there is a gradua1 shift of emphasis from the word to the image. This movement is reflected not only in the chapter titles "Word" and "Image" but occurs within each chapter. This narrative element represents less a dialectical progression towards a synthesis than a series of fragments engaged in related, but distinct problems. Furthermore, this movement is felt in the shifi from a comparative emphasis

For exampleothe first chapter of The DeMls is entitled "htead of an Introduction [~~ee~iie]: A few details from the biography of the wellesteemed Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovenslq-" (7 7). between Dostoevsky and German philosophy in the chapter "Word" to a more focused cornparison between Hans Holbein the Younger's The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb and dialectical images in Dostoevsky's novels. The structure of this larger narrative is bnefiy outlined below. In the first section of chapter one, "'Vseporvole~zo'and 'vse za vsekh vzrzoi~a~:The Semantics of Plot," the fom that the dialectic assumes in The Brothers Kararnazov is examined. This examination focuses on the ideas characters utter and on the relationship between these ideas and the plot of the novel. The ways in which ideas interrelate with one another is explored in relation to Kant's antinomies of reason. In terms of the semantics of plot, the murder of Fyodor Kararnazov is interpreted in relation to the indirectly antithetical ideas "everything is permitted" and "everyone is guilty for everyone." Inversely, the ways these ideas enter the plot and idluence the events leading to that murder are also examined. Although the problem of representation is mentioned only in passing in this section. the ideational opposition between self-consciousness and mathematics that emerges from the characters' voices is developed in relation to the pragmatics of the novel's plot in a manner that problematizes the representational hierarchy Bakhtin establishes between the mimesis of consciousness and mimesis of piot in a polyphonic novel. One of the consequences of this dialectical refraction of the plot through the ideas of the novel is the thesis that the dialectical negation of the novel's ideas and the dialogic orchestration of these ideas complement one another. Because the ideas of the characters are dialectically and dialogically engaged, this section is primarily focused on the word. The second section of the first chapter, "Origin of the Dialectic in The Brothers Karamazov: A Formal Approach," examines the possibility raised throughout the first section that there are findamental antinomies in the novel. The section begins with the problematics of determinhg whether a dialectical approach elucidates the dialectic in the novel or assumes undialectically that the novel possesses dialectical elements. Since the possibility is raised that the truth of a dialectical methodology cannot be demonstrated dialectically without encountering problems of circularity, this second section employs demonstrative reasoning more than any of the other sections and consequently has stronger narrative elements. Mer examining approaches to the problem of the dialectic that focus too much on the ideas of the characters (word) and too much on the aesthetic forrn of the dialectic (image), this section Ieads to an examination of the relationship between word and image in the representations of the novel. The examination of the form of the dialectic in The Brothers Kararnazov in the first section leads to the problem of the dialectics ofform in the second. The dialectics of fom is interpreted as the dialectics of realist representation. The dialectic of enlightenment within modem representation is briefly explored at the end of this section in terms of a negative relationship between word and image. The argument for a dialectics of form at the end of the first chapter provides a foundation for the rnethodology employed in the first section of chapter two, "The Divine and the Lirnits of Representation." This section examines the history of European representation in relation to the problerns of portraying the divine. This history includes brief interpretations of the "icon," the "idol" and the "Renaissance image" and the examines the shifis in the ontological relations between God and the image-maker. Both the dialectic of belief and the dialectic of edightenment are linked to the problem of divine representation by the character Ippolit in The Idiot during his interpretation of Hans Holbein the Younger's The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb. The antagonisms between the textual source for this painting in the Bible and the representational limits of the Renaissance image are elucidated. From this analysis of modern representation, the many ways through which Dostoevsb evokes the presence of God in The Brothers Karamazov are explored. This exarnination of the evocation of God focuses on specific images and passages fiorn The Brothers Kararnazov, including Ivan's "The Grand Inquisitor" and the corruption of Zosima's flesh. In these two passages the problem of the miracle of incarnation of the Word in Christ's fiesh is related both to the problem of bodyhpirit dualism and to the problem of representing miracles. It is precisely the miracle of the incarnation of the Word that Holbein problernatizes in the Dead Christ. Wliereas Ivan passes over the problem of the miracle of the incarnation in his portrayal of Christ, the significance for representation of Zosima's decaying flesh is explored in relation to the decaying flesh of Holbein's Christ. Whereas this first section of the chapter "Image" examines how Dostoevslq probes the Iimits of representation in order to evoke the presence of the divine, the final section, " Aesthetic Distance and the Image of the Kenotic Christ," explores the ways through which the aesthetic distance between subject and object in modem representation are diminished by Holbein and Dostoevsky. Whereas Holbein reduces aesthetic distance through distortions in linear perspective, DostoevsIq draws dialecticat images and develops an aesthetic based on intersubjectivity. These reductions lead to an aesthetic and theological emphasis on the image. A theology of the image, one based on the PauIine doctrine of kenosis, is related to Holbein's aesthetic of death and Dostoevsky's aesthetic of suffenng. The messianic and aesthetic relationships between beauty and suffering are explored in two dialectical images of suffering in The Brothers Karamazov. The first image is one of the pictures of suffering children in Ivan's "RebeUion" and the second one is created by Lise Khokhlakova in a moment of self-hatred. 1. Word

1.1. Vsepozvoleno and vse ra vsekh vrnovatyL: The Semantics of Plot

The dialect of belief in The Brothers Karamazov receives its purest exposition in the chapter "Over Cognac" when Fyodor Karamazov asks Ivan and Alyosha in tum whether God and immortality exist. The absoluteness of the antithesis between Ivan's "no" and Alyosha's "yes," an antithesis that is highlighted by Ivan's response "absolutely nothing

[co~eprrre~~biii~ynb]" to his father's drunken suggestion that "perhaps, there is some sort

of thing? [MOX~6bITb, HeWO K~KO~-HM~YA~e~~b?]'' (1 185), is hter quaiified and problematized by Ivan's confession that he does accept God and had wanted to "tease" (1 297) Alyosha with his earlier response and by Alyosha's confession to Lise that "perhaps 1 don't beIieve in Gad" (1 282). Even during the conversation at Fyodor's house the precision of Ivan's and Alyosha's language is diaiogically mediated by the voice of the more prolix ~~odor.'thus preventing their antithetical statements from settling long enough to reveal a generalized identity that would allow them to be synthesized in a Hegelian acrfhebzrng. Operating discursively only within such dialogues, the dialectic of belief moreover remains unresolved even within the individual consciousnesses of the characters. No single consciousness has a hierarchical pnvilege to truth. If the dialogic life of the word prevents the synthetic identity of thesis and antithesis, then, more importantly, Alyosha's and Ivan's later qualifications reflect the general displacement of the dialectic of belief away fiom purely antithetical exposition throughout The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan's equivocation about his belief in God and his reluctance to answer directly for the phrase vse pornoleno is matched by Zosima's neglect of the central thesis of Ivan's "rebellion [Gym]" conceming the suffering of chiidren, a thesis which he could not have known about anyway within the timeiine of the novel. In response to

1 The words "vse pozvolenû" and %se zo vsekh vinovnty" cmbe translated as '-evecthing is perrnissible" and "everyone is guilty for everyone else" respectively. 'For esample, tvan's "sovershennyi nul' [completely nothing]" paraphrases his fathrr's earlier. hyperbolic "sovershemeishii nul' [the most completely nothing]." Through this paraphrase Ivan situates his scholarly word in dialogic relûtion to his father's camivalized word. Dostoevsky's much quoted explanation in his letter to Pobedonostsev that Zosima's answer to the Grand Inquisitor is not "point by point, but oniy indirect [no rrynh-ra~,a

niimb KOCB~HHLI~],"Konstantin Mochulsky makes the insightfil comment that Zosimats answer to Ivan "is not given in the plane of the question" (486). This comment does not account for the inverse side of the ostensible veil thrown over open antitheses - the tendency of central characters to agree on fiindamental points despite their ostensible differences on the question of the existence of God. Philip Rahv calls this philosophical identification between the "propagandist" in Dostoevslq and those characters who disagree with him "complicity" (146), an insight that can be rendered more dialogic by extending it to the philosophical relations between characters as well. This play of indirect antitheses and complicity, broken intermittently by direct, arresting oppositions, evokes the existence of fiindamental antinomies in The Brothers Karamazov without providing a language capable of systematically elucidating them. Erasing itself through formalization, such a systemic language would resolve the mystery of the characters' relation to these antinomies whose shadow appears only through their own language. The dialectic of belief is most immediately displaced by the two, indirectly antithetical statements vsepozvoleno and vse za vsekh vinowz~.Altho~igh the second idea is opposed more perfectiy by Ivan's thesis that suffering exists and "no one is gdty [srr~os~brsH~T]" (1 307), the ideas vse pozvolem and vsr m vsekh vhiovcr~.can both be held to be tme without a contradiction in terms. Furthemore, the selection of these two staternents reflects less their greater cogency over similar staternents in the novel or their ostensibly central positions in Ivan's "Grand Inquisitor" and in Alyosha's "The Life of the Elder Zosirna" (the two narratives that dominate Dostoevsky's correspondence with Pobedonostsev) than the vibrant dialogic life both statements live in the novel and their interpretive significance for the central moment of the plot, the murder of Fyodor Karamazov. Whereas the first criterion for this selection is suggested by Bakhtin hiinself' the second criterion confronts Bakhtin's statement that the "ordinary pragmatics of the

' "Let us again recall Ivan Karamazov's idea that 'evewng is permitted' if there is no immortality for the soui. What an intense diaiogic life that idea leads throughout the whole of The Brothers Karcrmazov' what heterogeneous voices relay it dong' into what unespected dialogic contacts it enters!?' (Prob[erns 89). plot play a secondary role" (7) in Dostoevsky's novels. Ln his review of literary criticism in the second volume cf Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur "rejoices" at Bakhtin's raising of discourse to "the level of a structural principle of the novel," but he disagrees that it is ody the monologic novel that "continues to conform to the principle of composition based on emplotrnent." The mimesis of discourse (or, for Bakhtin, consciousness) and the rnimesis of action do not need to be mutuaily exclusive (96, 97). While suspending the problern of mirnesis tiIl later sections, an attempt to interpret the ideas of the characters in terrns of the events in the plot and, inversely, the role ideas play as objects in the plot dialectically negotiates the relationship between seK-consciousness and mathematics and thus between the mimesis of consciousness and the mimesis of action. If the rnimesis of consciousness and the mimesis of action are both structuîing principles, then the dialectic between self-consciousness and mathematics nevertheless also ernerges from the voices of the characters. Although the events of the plot cannot pragmatically arbitrate the validity of ideas, the characters themselves interpret and reinterpret their own ideas as these ideas enter praxis. Throughout The Brothers Kararnazov theory is already praxis and praxis is theoretically reflected upon. As Bakhtin himself argues, the idea in Dostoevsky's novels is an "event" (279). Rather than being secondary to the chorus of voices, the mechanics of plot are refracted through the voices of characters as they attempt to determine their relationships to the events of the plot and ideas enter the plot as potentid murder weapons. This reflective process makes the characters not just "author-thinkers" (Problems 5), but also the novel's first critics. The idea vse zn vsekh viriovaty is dialogically orchestrated no less fully than its counterpart vse yozvoieno. The idea assumes its original fom in the narrative time and in the tiine of the story through the voice of Zosima's brother Marke1 as "each of us is guilty before everyone in everything, and I most of ail [BCFIKMM ~3 H~Cnpen sceMkr BO nceM BmoBaT, a ~6onee~cex]" ( 1 357, 358). In Alyosha's "Life of the Elder zosima" alone the idea is repeated numerous times in such a vanety of forms as to render any definitive count of its occurrence problernatic. Zosirna's mother questions her dying son Marke1 about it, Zosima remembers this idea before his duel, defends it in society afier the duel and explores its significance in the theoretical sections of the "Life," and the mysterious visitor expresses his surprise that someone as young as Zosima should understand its truth "at once in such firllness" (1 373). In a moment of rapture on the night derZosima's fiineral, Alyosha orchestrates this idea fürther through his desire to forgive "not himself, but for everyone and for everything [~eceGe, a sa xex, 3a sce I? 3a BCH]"(2 45). On the eve of the trial Mitya utters the idea "vse za vsekh vinovay" (2 297) (did he hear this idea earlier from Aiyosha?) during his agitated thoughts about his responsibility for the "baby [nme]" he saw in tiis dream. Repeating what may have been Mitya's own thoughts, the defence lawyer Fetyukovich specuiates that Mitya would exclaim "1 am guilty before al1 people [rr i3IiHosa-r npen BceMM ~EOA~MM]"(2 470) if, ironically, the juror would bring in a verdict of not guilty. Through the ecstatic, tearful cries of Marke1 and Alyoslia, the calm persuasion of the dying Zosima, high society's laughter before the young Zosima the mysterious visitor's ideological and moral intensity, Mitya's despair and Fetyukovich's sophistry, the idea vse za vsekh vi~ovatyis linguistically modulated and semantically transformed, represented in reported speech, dialogue, double-voiced discourse and parody, and defines for different characters their points of view on death, on crimes comrnitted and uncomrnitted, and on God's creation. Tt is because of this fecundity of dialogic life, not despite it, that the idea i~sezrr \-i-ekh viriowty finctions as an interpretation of the murder of Fyodor Karamazov. Through the voices of the characters and the narrator (whose horizontal position alonçside the characters Bakhtin elucidates), a dense semantic web of ideas floods the events of the novel with inexhaustible meaning. If there is a monoIogica1 moment in The Brothers Karamazov, then it consists not in the confirmation of any single idea or set of ideas but in the negativity of al1 ideas that attempt to explain the events of the novel in isolation. Whereas the dialectical negation of ideas chat have the fom of abstract, isolated propositions can be read through the dialogic accents these ideas acquire in orchestration. the distribution and dispersion of the dialectic is at the same time accomplished dialogically. This interplay of the semantics of dialectics and the dialogic manifestation of dialectics animates the Me of ideas in The Brothers Karamazov. The idea both "helps self- consciousness assert its sovereignty in Dostoevsky's artistic world," and the idea "begins to live, that is, to take shape, to develop, to find and renew its verbal expression. to jive birth to new ideas, only when it enters into genuine dialogic relationships with other ideas, with the ideas of others" (Problems 79, 88). Self-consciousness defines itseif and the world through its own signiwg discourse, but this discourse only lives in the world of dialogue between consciousnesses, a dialectic that makes concrete Hegel's thesis that "self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness" (Phenomeno1o.w of Mind 3 99). Thus ifthe life of the idea in dialogue defines the consciousness of individual characters, then Bakhtin's thesis that in Dostoevsky's world there is a "phrrcrlity of coi~sciozrsrres.ses.with epdi'ighrs m7d emh wiih its orviz worLd' (6)misinterprets the dialogic relationship between consciousnesses and between their cornpeting ideas by arresting the dialectic of the double self-consciousnesses through the idealism of the rhetoric of equality. Neither consciousness, nor the ideas through which it defines itself and the world, possess "nghts" in Dostoevsky's novels. Bakhtin's assertion that ideas enter "the great dialogue of the novel on complereiy eqital terms" (92) not only conflicts with his own insights about the dialogic contestation of ideas in that great dialogue, but betrays Dostoevsky's critique of Enlightenrnent by transforming the ideas of his characters into points of view on the world. As points of view on the world, ideas have no other purpose than passive speculation. David Hume's conclusion at the end of An Inquiry con ce min^ Human Understanding that al1 books which do not contain "any abstract reasoning conceming quantity or number" or "any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence" should be cornmitted "to the flames" (173) overstates the Enlightenment's position on speculative thought, for mere idle opinions are neither silenced nor censored in enlightened, democratic States. On the contrary, speculation is simply ignored unless it demonstrates its utility in praxis. Instead of diaiogue between ideas that preserve their ability to signify even as they enter the aesthetic world of the novel, ideas degenerate in Bakhtin's rhetoric of equality into "world views,"" for the

" In her recent article on theodicy in The Brothers Kararnazov. T. A. Kasatkina intzrprets Dostoevsky's comment about the relation between Zosirna's response to Ivan's rebellion as "not thesis against thesis" but as "worldview against worldview" (49). Dostoevsb hLmseIf uses the word "worldview [~qoso~speriue]"in the same letter to Pobedonostsev. The individual. as well as the relativistic understanding of the plurality of woridviews, represents only one moment in Dostoevsky's dialectic between European thought and Russian unie. a dialectic whose acsthetic plurality of points of view that Bakhtin celebrates in Dostoevsky's novels is paid for by the monotonous relativism of al1 points of view. Bakhtinfsinsight that there is no hierarchy of voices holds tme since al1 discourses, including the narrator's, are represented by an objective author, but this lack of hierarchy does not irnply that the ideationd content of each voice is relativized simply because each voice is situated alongside other voices. The tmth content lying within the voices of the novels are also dialectically negated as ideas enter the plot and attempt to describe the events of the plot. The ideas in Dostoevsky's novels are heard only through the orchestration of voices in dialogue, but the tmth content of ideas is dialectically tested even as the process of negation itself çenerates a melody cf thought that can be dialogically orchestrated. B y approaching dialectics through dialogics, the orchestration of vse zrc vsekh virrovaty throughout the novel reveals the negation lying within this thesis. Reversing Markel's original desire to ask forgiveness of al1 creation because he is guilty before everything ( 1 358), Aiyosha wants to forgive al1 creation. Although they begin from different theses. both move dialectically to the same proposition that others will forgive them. Nevertheless, the connections between Alyosha's ideas, as they develop within one sentence, are more dialogically cornplex than Markel's. Mer beginning with the narrator's direct comment that Alyosha "wanted to forgive everyone for everything and to ask for

forgiveness [npocmb xoTenocb eMy ~cexii sa Bce w npocmb npo~~.te~u>r],"the sentence is broken by the exclamation "Oh! not for himself, but for everyone, for everything [O!He

ceGe, a sa Bcex, sa Bce ii sa ~cn]."This phrase is still presented as the narrator's speech but clearly contains Alyosha's intonations and thus is double-voiced. The sentence finally

ends with "but 'others will ask forgiveness for me' [a 'sa Mem ir npyrcre npocm']" (2 45),

form depends on the broader opposition between the ntionalized word and the image of Christ. Agreeing with Bakhtin about the equalie of voices in Dostoevskj, Kasatkina argues that nherzas truth is relativized between Zosirna and Ivan wïthin the tvortd of the novet this does not mean that Dostoevsky himself '-doesn't know the truth" (51. 52). in contnst to Bakhtin's dialogic understanding of tmth but arguing from one of his theoretical positions. Kasatkina isolates content from form by preserving for Dostoevsky an extra-literaq relation to truth. Truth for Dostoevsky must nevertheless be understood in aesthetic terms. Bakhtin himself provides a much more aesthetic understanding of tmth when he writes that "tmth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born beiween people collectively searchmg for truth. in the process of their dialogic interaction" (Problems 1 10). recorded with quotation marks, indicating that these words are Myosha's. The dialectical movement which leads to the idea that others will forgive him is thus marked by two breaks in discourse that refract the idea between the voice of the narrator and Alyosha. If the one-sided desire to forgive everything but oneself dialecticaly gives rise to the salvaging concept that "others will forgive me," then the propositional nature of the idea becomes mediated through the dialogic interaction of two voices. In a more obvious example,' Fetyukovich introduces the idea that Mitya will exclaim his guilt before ail if he is acquitted in a speech that dsewhere seeks in an Eniightenment rnanner to absolve Mitya's guilt. AIthough clairning not to believe in Mitya's guilt, Fetyukovich alludes to the possibility that Mitya was temporarily insane, demystifies the words "father" and "parricide" in an attempt to demonstrate that Fyodor Karamâzov "does not at al1 match the understanding of a father" and to persuade the jurors that were the case not one of pamcide they would have rejected the accusation of murder (2 463, 464)' and hints throughout his speech that Mitya's cnminal disposition may have resulted from socio-economic causes. That Fetyukovich's discourse is parodically represented is discernible because of his mixture of ideas that are not inherently incompatible but are incompatible within the discursive lirnits that the novd itself draws. More specifically, Fetyukovich transplants a version of the idea use za vsekh virroi,cry into a speech whose major enlightened ideas are in antinomical opposition to it.' Instead of espressing the

Dialectics and dialogics clearly do not always intersecf. for although only some utterances in the novel are dialectically nuanced al1 utterances in the novel are diaIogical1y voiced. 6 Bakhtin writes of parody that "here, as in stylization? the author again speaks in someone else's discourse, but in contrast to stylization parody introduces into that discourse a semantic intention that is directIy opposed to the original one. The second voice, once hawig made its home in the other's discourse, clashes hostilely with its primordial host and forces him to serve directly opposing aims" (ProbIems 193). in The Brothers Karamazov. the basis for the parodic conflict bettveen the author's hidden voice and a character's voice lies in the novel's antinomies. Those ideologists who only superficially dissolve the antinomies that the novel prssents them are parodically portrayed. Thus the atheist Rakitin argues, against both Ivan and Zos irna that "humanity will find within itself how to live for virtue. even if it doesn't believe in the immortalih- of the sok" (1 126). Dostoevsky's entire representation of Rakitin exploits the clash benreen Rakitin's espounded liberalism and al1 that his atheism entails ideologically for the author's hidden voice. The hidden dialogue between the author and Rakitin that is perceptible ~vithinthe latter's voice does not render the author's voice monologically correct. Nevertheless. this hidden dialogue does evoke the presence of fhdarnental antinomies within the novel. mutual guilt of all, Fetyukovich's manipulation of the idea vse =rr vsekh vi?io~.a~.in his defence of Mitya causes it to veer towards its opposite - vse po-7.oltm. That Fetyukovich is parodically portrayed cannot erase this antinornical inversion. On the contrary. parody reflects the pain of the dialectical corruption of a beautiful idea. If the negation of the idea vse za vsekh vinovaty cm be read through its orchestration, then it only becomes concrete as it enters praxis. While on the one hand praxis refers to the organization of the plot, on the other praxis itself enters the idea-world of the novel through Zosima's "active, living love [m6osb nenrenbean, XUG~R]" ( 1 395). The juilt and responsibility for the murder of Fyodor Karamazov that the major characters express provide textual links between the universal and particular forms of the idea vse =a mekh viizovaîy. These textual links have been well researched and thus only a bnef summary is here outlined. ' Alyosha is guilty for having neglected to search for Mitya on the day of the murder. Zosima had instructed him to do so on the eve of the murder (1 353)- and he himseIf remembers only derthe murder that he had forgotten about Mïtya (2 19). Smerdyakov argues that Ivan's idea vse po,woleno provided him with his theoretical justification for committing the rnurder, thus rendering Ivan the "main murderer" and Srnerdyakov only his "stooge [np~cneu~~~]"(2 33 l), an interpretation of their relationship which Ivan himself later defends in court (2 40 1). Aiyosha disputes this complicity by insisting throughout that Smerdyakov alone is puilty, but what is more important here than a demonstration of moral guilt is that the transmission of Ivan's idea to Smerdyakov represents an essential, physical connection between Ivan and the murder. As Smerdyakov States to Ivan, "because of your word 1accomplished the deed," a phrase that deductively links "word [cno~o]"and "deed [neno]" (2 33 1). Srnerdyakov, of course. physically commits the deed. Although Mitya admits only to having wanted to kill his

7 Golosovker, for esample. begins his work Dostoevskv and Kant \vith a tliorougb textuai stud!. of the many accusations and codessions of guilt that the characters utter throughout the novsl. Linking Mitya's repeated exclamation that "the devil must have killed him," the defenct: anorne>-'s suggestion that there may have been a sisth figure at Fyodor Karmazov's estate on the night of the murder, the public prosecutor's speculations about the absence of a third suspect. and the tel-tual parallels behveen Ivan's interviews with Smerdyakov and his conversation with the Devil. Golosovker reaches the provocative conclusion that the Devil killed F>rodor and that the devil is Smerdyakov (13). It is fiom this concIusion that he begins his insightfd study of the Kantian antinomies in The Brothers Karamazov. father (2 149) and thus does not directly accept responsibility for his death, Smerdyakov asserts that had Mitya not corne to his father's house on the night of the murder then the murder would not have taken place (2 334). Similady, both Mitya in his drunken letter (2 326) and, indirectly, Smedyakov in his conversation with Ivan as the latter is preparing to leave Skotoprigonevsk indicate that their intentions on Fyodor's life are contingent on Ivan's decision to leave. Although Katerina Ivanovna does not admit her share of responsibility in the murder, Mitya in his letter explicitly States his intention to kili his father in order to acquire the three thousand rubles that he owes her. Lastly. Grushenka

exclaims that "1 am the first, the main one who is guilty [s BL~HOB~T~.n nepeax H rnasnax]" (2 149) for having tormented both Mitya and Fyodor to a dangerous extent. Some of these pragmatic relationships between the characters and the murder of Fyodor Karamazov do not enter the self-consciousnesses of the characters themselves. Each self-consciousness, which Bakhtin considers "the dominant of the hero's representation" (78) in Dostoevsky's novels, does not universally react to al1 ideas and events within the novel, nor could each self-consciousness be universally extended without al1 consciousnesses tautoiogically overlapping one another. Without relinquishing its function as a structuring principle in the representation of characters, self-consciousness nevertheless also enters the dialectic of the novel in opposition to mathematics. The infinitely many connections between each character's action and inaction to the murder provide the basis for the possibility of each character's self-conscious admission of guilt." In a rnechanistic interpretation of the events of novel, had Kuzma Sainsonov, Lyagavy or Khokhlakova given Mitya three thousand rubles on the day of the murder. then the murder may not have occurred. Mitya would no longer require the three thousand rubles promised to Grushenka and he may not have appeared under Fyodor's window. an action that initiates Smerdyakov's Iater decisions. From a moral perspective, Fyodor himself is arguably more guilty for his own death than any other character in the novel. The connections listed in the paragraph above, however, are derived textually either fi-orn a character's sense of guilt (Alyosha, Ivan, Smerdyakov, Grushenka) or fiom their share of

8 It is precisely inaction, or lack of active, living love- that enables Zosima to generaiizt: about the universal guilt of al1 (1 394). responsibility in the murder as derived deductively by themselves or other characters (Mitya, Ivan, Smerdyakov, GNshenka, Katerina). Katerina's and Gmshenka's objective roles in the murder cannot entirely be deduced from the events of the plot since Mitya's financial debt to the former and his jealousy towards the latter represent two distinct causal chains, either one of which aione may explain his presence under his father's window. By contrast, Ivan's idea me pornoleno. his decision to leave town. and Mitya's presence under the window are preconditions for Smerdyakov's deed. Much more subtle and tentative causal chains link the four brothers to the climax of the novel's second plotline, Ilyusha's death. While Alyosha actively loves the children in his comrnunity and helps reconcile Ilyusha with his schoolmates, Ivan Karamazov recounts horrific stories of suffering children taken from newspaper articles. That Ivan doesn't notice the children in his community plays on the novel's recurnng dialectic of abstract love for humanity and active love for one's neighbour (Gessen 323)- In terms of plot? however, this failure to transform theory into praxis only negatively explains the absence of a pragmatic link between Ivan and the events of the novel's second plotline. Mitya, on the other hand, initiates the events of the second plotline by beating Snegiryov in the presence of his son Ilyusha. The humiliation that Ilyusha expenences because of this beating leads Ium to quarrel repeatedly with his schoolmates. During one of these quarrels, six boys throw rocks at Ilyusha. One of the rocks thrown at him " hit.. in the chest; he jumped, started to cry and ran up the hill" (1 234). Alyosha. afier having witnessed this exchange of rocks and having caught up with Ilyusha, comments to Ilyusha that "one of the rocks muSt have hul? yOU badly [B~COnHH KaMeHb, JIOnXHO 6b1~b,OqeHb 6onbso ynap~n]"(1 235). When Alyosha amves that night at the Snesiryovs', he learns from Ilyusha's father that one rock hit him in the chest and that Ilyusha has fdlen il1 ( 1 265). Mer the two month lapse in the timeline of the novel, the only information given conceming the etiology of Ilyusha's illness is the schoolboy Smurov's opinion that Ilyusha has "consumption" (2 223). Besides the inconclusive evidence that the blow from the rock leads to Ilyusha's fatal illness and Smurov's suggestion about consumption, his illness may have originated f?om psychological causes related to the humiliation he felt during and &er his father's beating. Nevertheless, his anxiety about the health and whereabouts of the dog "Zhuchka," whom he had injured by feeding it a piece of bread with a pin inside it, would seem more clearly to influence the later course of his illne~s.~According to Kolya Krasotkin, Smerdyakov taught him this "joke" (2 223). In support of either psychological etiology, it should be noted that Ivan, Mitya, Smerdyakov. Grushenka, Katerina, the mysterious visitor and the public prosecutor al1 suffer psychosomatic ilinesses related to events in the novel. Only Smurov, in a comment directly refemng to Ilyusha's father, alludes to the possible connection between Mitya and Ilyusha's iilness when he says "that pamcide is çuilty in everything, when he beat him then" (2 224). Ifthese self-conscious admissions of guilt and causal chains linking the characters' actions to Fyodor's murder and Ilyusha's death provide textual dernonstrations withîn the plot for the idea "vse zn vsekh vi~zovaty,"then the development of the idea itself within the discourse of the characters nevertheless problematizes the feasibility of its empirical demonstration. Through a dialectical modulation of the idea vsr zn vsrkh virrovafythat grounds its moral significance in the objective world, Zosima argues that "as soon as you take on yourself the responsibility for others sincerely, you will irnmediately see that you

are in fact guilty for everyone and everything [qyrb TonbKo cnenaewb ce& 3a Bce 11 3a

BCeX OTBeTWiKOM MCKpeHHO, TO TOTZIaC Xe YBMntlLiib, 'lTO OH0 TâK M eCTb B CaMOM Aene

t~ ~TOTH-TO M eCTb 3a xex M 3a BCH BUHOB~T]"(1 392). Kant's categorical imperative is no sooner evoked by Zosima then it is dialectically inverted, for the rational connection between the moral agent and moral Iaw postulated by the former is replaced by the unmotivated coincidence the latter establishes between the one who actively loves and the world as it actually is. In his work Dostoevsky and Kant, Golosovker explores similar parallels between Zosima and the "thesis" of Kant's antinomies of reason (59). He notes that the ideas of freedom, God and immortality found in the discourses of Zosima and Alyosha correspond to the thesis side of the Kantian antinomies.'' By overextending and

9 Besides Smerdyakov's and Mitya's possible influence on Ilqusha-s illness, Kolya kasotkin's hvo-week delay beisveen the moment he found the stray dog Zhuchka and his appearance with the dog at Ilyusha's bedside also seem to have affected IIlsha's psychological heaith, a possibi1i~-that Kolya himself seems to realize when he esdaims to Alyosha "how 1 regret and curse myself for not having corne sooner!" (2 258). 1O The thesis or "dogrnatic" side of Kant's third and fourth antinomies defend the follouing positions: "Causality in accordance with the laws of nature is not the only causality from whch schematizing these parallels, however, Golosovker not ody reduces some of the dialectical play between these antithetical position, but misses the full force of Dostoevsky's argument with Kant. Lf Ivan can be called the "dialectical hero of the Kantian antinornies" (34), then the theological questions which engage Zosima lead him on the one hand to expressions of ecstatic lyricism beyond Kantian antinomies and on the other hand to non- Kantian antinomies. Gessen also notes Ivan's relationship with the antithesis side of Kant's antinomies, but he argues that the opposition between active love and acedia is more central to the "tragedy of good as love." Whereas Zosima theoreticaiiy elucidates the relationship between goodness and love, the despondent Alyosha tragicall y forget s Mitya on the day of his father's rnurder (328, 329). Nevertheless, Zosirna entangles hirnself in the antinornies of the Enlightenment precisely when he dismisses the Enlightenrnent concept of freedom (1 3 85). If the phrases "vse za vsekh vinovaty" and "vse pumoleno" represent the Kantian "thesis" and "antithesis" respectively (Golosovker 42, 59), then both ideas are antinomically situated within the cluster of ideas they metonymically represent. The idea "i~se=rr vsekl~ vii~ovaty,"tùnctioning alongside the ideas of freedom, the immortality of the sou1 and the existence of God, appears in Zosima's discourse not only as a moraI imperative but as a law of nature. Reason rnay have an "interest" in the resolution of the antinornies (Critique of Pure Reason 422), and certaidy no rationalistic ethics could be established without reckoning with Kant's antinornies, but Zosima's resolution of the Kantian antinomies is not rationa~istic.~~In contrast to the Devil's Cartesian cogito, Zosima declares that a spiritual being was once able to Say "1 am, and 1 love [sr ecm, M R nm6nm]" (1 395). There is

the appearances of the world can one and al1 be derived. To explain tliese appearances it is necessary to assume that there is also another causality, that of freedom" and "There belongs to the world, either as its part or its cause, a being that is absolutely necessan" (Critique of Pure Reason 409, 4 15). The antithesis side, which Kant considers "empiricd," denies that fi-eedom and an absolutely necessary being esist. The interrelating of causalie and freedom with the problem of the existence of God ("absolutely necessary being") and with rnoraliv are fundamental both to Kant's and Dostoevs~'~antinomies. II Beyond Zosirna's discourse. Mitya and Aiyosha bnefly dscuss what ethcs is. AI>.oslin considers that it is a science but that "1 confess, 1 can't esplain what kind of science it." Mica having mentioned that Rakitin knows what ethics is. ends the discussion \vit11 the phrase "Ths detil with ethics! [Yep~c @~r~oii!]"(2 292). moment of determinisrn in the thesis side of the Kantian antinomies precisely when it situates itself in an antinomical relationship to the antithesis side. In Kant's four antinomies the dogmatic, thesis side establishes ontological limits in space, time and being and provides the foundation, in an original free moment, for causaiity. By serving the cause of causality, the freedom of the thesis side annuls itseif in the third antinomy. Not only is the cosmogonie word of Zosima's "spiritual being" uttered in "infinite existence, immeasurable in time and space" (1 135), a position which appropriares the limitlessness of space and time of the antithetical position of Kant's first antinomy in a way that shatters the semantic constraints of dogmatic "thesis," but Zosima's notion of freedom has more radical intentions than a demonstration of the fourth antinomy's thesis that there is "a being that is absolutely necessary" (Critique of Pure Reason 415). As often occurs in his development of the idea vse ru vsekh vir~ovayin Markel's and Zosima's discourse (but not. it should be mentioned, in the mystenous visitorts exposition of the same idea), the word "and [u]" in Zosimats "1 am and 1 love" indicates a lack of logical comection between propositions. Zosima attempts to elude antinomies by transcending logic. Nevertheless, if logical connections are avoided then there are hierarchical ones. Love exists prior to thought, and it is only &er one morally acts as if everyone were guilty for everyone else that one becomes aware that human relations are thus constituted. Herein lies the ambiguity not only of Zosirna's discourse but of Dostoevsky's dialectic as a whole - life, love, image and affirmation have priority over reason, dialectic, word and negation but cannot engage their antithetical pairs without rendering themselves antithetical and thus becoming entangled in the dialectic. If Kant's transcendental idealism fails to transcend the antinomies of reason because reason itself has too much of an interest in causality, then Dostoevslq exploits the irrationalist moment of the thesis in an attempt to overtlow the antinomies with energy of life. From the narrator's comment at the end of Crime and Punishrnent that for Raskolnikov "iife had set it in place of dialectics [BM~CTO nwaneKTMm Hacqmana XM~H~]"(5 5 19) to Ivan Karamazov's exaltation of life over the meaning of life (1 293), dialectics is dialectically opposed to life in Dostoevsky's novels. If the escape fiom dialectics through life opens ont0 its own endless perpetuation because life itself degenerates to an idea, then the ecstasy and suffering of Dostoevsky's characters cannot be negated through a dialectic closed in on itself without ignoring the crisis of judgment excessive pain and joy, psychological limits that so ofien appear together in Dostoevsky's novels, present for the diaiectic. Although intense fervour cannot demonstrate the validity of a thesis, representations of ecstasy and suffering aesthetically problematize theories of life that attempt to know them. Long before Walter Benjamin bequeathed the dialectical image and with it "the obli,oation to think at the same time dialectically and undialectically" (Adorno, Minima Moralia 148), Dostoevsky had probed the iimits of the dialectic before the image of suffering. The philosophical merits of this dialectical escape from the dialectic is less significant than the way in which the dialectics of life and the life of the dialectic infonns Dostoevsky's aesthetics. Stated differently, if "the world can only be justified as an aesthetic phenornenon" (Nietzsche Binh of Traeedv 143), then the philosophy of the novel cannot be interpreted outside of the realm of aesthetics. One of the immediate consequences of Dostoevsky's dialectic as it appears in the form of The Brothers Karamazov is a transformation of the semantics of plot. As Bakhtin himself notes, "in every voice he could hear two contending voices, in every expression a crack, and the readiness to go over immediately to another contradictory expression." No sooner does Bakhtin provide this negativity with a means of artistic manifestation in contending voices than he notes that "none of these contradictions and bifurcations ever became dialectical. they were never set in motion along a temporal path in an evolving sequence" (30). Whereas Hegel writes that "true reality.... is the process of its own becoming the circle which presupposes its end as its purpose, and has its end for its beginning; it bccomes concrete and actual only by being camed out, and by the end it invotves" (Phenomenoiow 8 l), reality in The Brothers Karamazov is already described and presupposed. undialecticaIly, through the voices of the narrator and the characters. Thus a progressive. circular process of concretization is unnecessary. The negative movement felt within the voices of characters results from their analysis, not synthesis, of the images they descnbe and by which they are conftonted. The contradictions ehcidated within the images in turn enable more contradictory voices to emerge as doubles in the creative process. The dialectic thus finds artistic expression not only in the voices themselves but in the relation of voices to the events of plot. Having given priority to accepting morally the responsibility for everyone and everything over the existence of a causaiity that unites everyone in the world, Zosirna avoids a rationalistic reconciliation of freedom and causality in ethics by emphasizing freedom over causality. Thus the validity of the idea ct.se :a vsekh vtnova~cannot be affirrned inductively by an ernpirical. textual analysis that charts the admissions of guiit for the murder of Fyodor Kararnazov that the novel's characters make or deductively by tracing the causal chains between characters and the events of the murder without negating Zosima's version of the idea c'se =a vsekh vzr~ovaîy itself Whereas Anthony Cascardi philosophicaIly suggests that "Zosima's principies of general responsibility can be taken as an excuse, as exempt@ us from individual response" (124), this inversion of the idea vse za vsekh vinovaty is already parodically accomplished within the novel through Fetyukovich's voice. If the idea is reductively interpreted only in terms of the pragmatic links in the plot, the idea once again transforms into its opposite - vse pomolerzo. If al1 that exist are pragmatic links govemed by the laws of nature, then morality does not exist according to the dialectic the novel itself develops. The presence of pragmatic links in the plot and the utterances of "favoured" characters cannot, as they could in a monological novel, provide evidence for the validity of themes. Themes, in Dostoevsky's novels, are replaced by ideas whose negativity prevents them from being confirrnable in isolation, within the limits of a singie consciousness, or through their manifestation in the plot. Moreover, the problematic between an idea and its manifestation in plot does not simply leave the novel open to a deconstmction of the novel's rhetonc in terrns of its sernio~o~~.~*On the contrary, the deconstruction of pragmatic links between plot and idea is accompIished by the novel itself in a critique of mat hematical structures. Furthemore, the irrationalist moment of fieedom in Zosima's discourse does not condemn the idea vse za vsekh vit~ovapto a tautology of the unthinkable. Zosima. like Dostoevsky, is a realist. It is the relationship between ideas and the pragmatics of plot.

" Paul de Man oultines this deconstnictive approach in the introductoq. cliapter --Semioloç?. and Rhetorico'of Allegories of Readins. not the tmth content of the ideaper se, that is fundamental to its negative representation. In terms of the idea itself, Adorno arrives at a position sirnilar to Zosima's in his own critique of Kant's third antinomy when he writes that "the more f?eedom for the subject the more its responsibility, the greater its feeling of wilt" (Nepative Dialectics 22 1 ). Nevertheless, there is texnial evidence that Zosima's ecstatic word itself fails to negotiate the limit between dialectics and Me. Mer Ivan's critique of a God and of a worId that permit the suffenng of children, Zosima begins his discourse in the "Life" from the

opposite, theodistic extreme by repeating Markelts declaration that "life is paradise [XIISHL

ecTb paii]]." In a movement that seems implicitly to acknowledge that perhaps Iife is not paradise for such children as those whose sufferings Ivan narrates, Markel qualifies his extrerne position by adding that "we dont want to know this, but if we wanted to

acknowledge it, then tomorrow paradise would be established on eanh [na He XOT~IM

3HaTb TOrO, a eCJiM 661 3âXOTenM PHaTb, 3aBTpa Xe H CïûJI 6b1 Ha BCeM CBeTe paM]" ( 1 357). Regressing from this rapturous affirmation of life, Markel, and later Zosima. quali@ their affirmation and thus condemn their idea to the negation of the dialectic. Lt is not until Zosima adopts an expository form in Alyosha's "The Life of the Elder Zosima" and forkits the basis in life that his earlier narrative form had provided that the negation lurking within the idea vse rn vsekh vznovaîy fully manifests itself. The evil that exists in the world is revealed to have at least one source in the Enlightenment's interpretation of freedom as

"the augmentation and quick alleviation of needs [nprq~~oxe~iieii cKopoe yroneaiie norpe6nocreii"J (1 385). If Ivan's tragedy is that of the "good as freedom" (Gessen 3 15). then the tragedy of Zosima's word begins when he negates the Enlightenrnent concept of freedom. Near the end of his discourse, Zosima suggests that hell is for those who have scorned active love, life and God while alive. While elucidating well the consequences of such repudiation, Zosima does not reveal the origin of this evil. or the source of this repudiation, until the very last paragraph. Ending wliere Ivan began, with evil oriçinating fiom human fieedom, Zosima states that there are at least some who have chosen hell as

"voiuntary martyrs [AO~~OXOTH~I~M~Y~HHKH]": "And they will burn eternaiiy in the fire of their own wrath. thirsting for death and non-existence. But they won? receive death...@ GYAJT ï0p-b B orne rHeBa cBoero BeqHO, Xa>KnaTbChlepTii kï H~~~IT~UI.HO He iïOJIJFiaT CMePTM.. .]" (1 396). These are the last words in Alyosha's manuscript. AIthough the narrator in the next sentence insists that the manuscript is fragmentary, it is perhaps ody here that the voice of Alyosha, the compiler and author of the "Life of the Elder Zosima," is diatogically discernible. Whereas Ivan's, the narrator's and Christ's voice are al1 silently heard throughout the monologue of the Grand Inquisitor, the voices of the narrator and of Alyosha merge almost monologically with Zosima's first-person voice throughout the "Life of the Zosima." Here dialogics and dialectics meet, for it is precisely at the moment when the life-anirming Zosima descends to the depths of helI and there encounters those who Iike Ivan have repudiated God of their own Free wilI that a second voice is faintly heard in his monologue, the voice of the only character in the novel who listens to both Zosima's dying words and Ivan's rebellion. Alyosha's "Life of the Elder Zosima" is compiled later from Zosima's last words and fiom earlier discussions. Does the break in the manuscript occur on the night of Zosima's death? Does the break preserve at least a trace of Alyosha's thoughts at that last discussion? Beyond the philosophical questions of whether Zosima resolves Kant's antinomies or answers the rebellion of Ivan, beyond even the question of the importance of evil in Dostoevsky's creative process. the break in Nyosha's manuscript hints at a psychological and spiritual cause for the ncedia that paralyzes him on the day of his father's murder that is perhaps of no less importance than the corruption of Zosima's flesh - the corruption of Zosima's word.

In a more manifest way than with the idea vse zcr vsekh vinoiup, the idea ixe pozvoleno is ideologically contested in dialogue. The idea is first voiced by Mpsov at Zosima's ceIl in the presence of Mitya, Alyosha, Ralcitin and Zosima, al1 of w-hom voice their reactions towards it throughout the novel. Myusov, who notes that Ivan Karamazov had uttered the idea earlier to a group of society ladies, provides a brief but comprehensive exposition of the idea, establishing antinornical oppositions between God, irnrnortality, moral law on one side and atheism, rationality, self-interest, crime and even cannibalism on the other. Unlike the many unmotivated connections that occasionally mark Zosima's predominantly Iyrical and rapturous exposition of the idea vstr tcr vsekh vinovaty, Myusov's presentation of Ivan's idea use pozvoierzo is more t-igo~rously dialectical. Central to this dialectic is the question of belief in God and irnrnortality. without which not only love but also "living force [xgrsan c~na]"(1 1 12) wouId dry up in the world since there is no law in nature that requires human beings to love one other. For those who no longer believe in God and irnrnortality, moral law must be replaced by self- interest, even if self-interest leads to crime and cannibalism. In terms of the dialogical intonations of the idea vse pomler~o,it is significant that nowhere in the text does Ivan explicitly elaborate on his idea hirnself in any detail. Furthemore, each character who elucidates the idea as they perceive Ivan to propound it responds to different ideoiogical nuances and with dif5erent polemical intentions. Thus Myusov mentions Ivan's vse pozvoleno in order to demonstrate that the same person who defends such an idea in society and argues for a theocracy in a review article is an "eccentric" and a "paradoxicalist." After Myusov's presentation of the idea. Mitya immediately seeks confirmation about whether crime is not only perrnitted but the necessary position of any "atheist [~~~~oxHMK]"( 1 1 12). [van later calls this outburst "Mitya's redaction [pena~uirnMHT~H~KMH~] " ( 1 329), thus emphasizing that the idea Ilas been textually transformed through Mitya's voice. This redaction would seem to be related to his own desire to murder his father, who five pages later labels his son a "parricide." Mer Mitya's redaction, Zosima questions Ivan conceming his belief in God and his "dialectic [nuraneh-rwh-a]" conceming the Church question, thus aimin; at the center of the dialectic in a way that unsettles Ivan much more than Myusov's accusations of paradoxicality. Zosima suggests that Ivan is simply amusing himself with the Church question fiom despair, but as Ivan's response that "1 wasn't entirely joking" ( 1 L 13) indicates, this dialectic does nevertheless possesses a certain cogency for him. A stmcturally coherent dialectic, one which presents parallel dialectics for the antinomical positions of belief and disbelief leading to theocracy and anarchy respectively. is not explicitly developed within the novel despite Zosirna's and Ivan's ostensible agreements on both sides of such a dialectic. Mer the discussion at Zosima's cell, Rakitin tells Alyosha that Ivan's idea vse pozvoleno is "a debauched theory for scoundrels [nonneua~]"( 1 126). Later, however, Mitya recounts to Alyosha a discussion in which Rakitin defends the idea and in which Rakitin mocks Mitya for having failed to understand it before landing himself in prison (2 294). Aiyosha, finally, mentions the idea vse pozvoleno in relation to Ivan's stated desire to live in debauchery until the age of thirty, afker which he will escape sensualism "in a Karamazov manner [no-K~~~M~~OBCKH]"(1 329). Oniy in this dialogue does Ivan accept responsibility for his idea, stating that "if the word has already been uttered. 1 won't repudiate it" (1 329). Alyosha proceeds to kiss Ivan on the lips, thus textually connecting his response with Christ's earlier kiss on the lips of the Grand Inquisitor. Ivan himselfis delighted by the "literary plagiarism [nwrepa-ryp~oe~oposcrao] " ( 1 330)- In terms of the structure of Dostoevsky's dialectic, it is indicative both that Ivan should reluctantly be drawn into a discussion of the idea vsepozvoleno with Alyosha after the most dialectically textured chapters in the novel, "Rebellion" and "The Grand Inquisitor," and that the connections between this idea and the dialectics of the preceding two chapters should remain largely open and fragmentaly. The dialectic of the Grand Inquisitor neither supersedes nor fulfills the promise of Ivan's rebellion. Both illuminate the same contradictions that generate their rnovement, but from different beginnings and with different dialectical images. A Hegelian dialectical evolution is prevented, however. not only by dialectical imagery that arrests the flow of thought in a "configuration pregnant with tensions" (Benjamin 262) but by the shadow of apparently irresolvable and therefore unproductive antinomies. Shortly before reminding Ivan of the idea vse pomlerio. Alyosha reduces the "secret" of the Grand Inquisitor to his lack of belief in God (1 327). Just as Zosima reduces Ivan's comrnents on the church question to the problem of belief. Alyosha arrests the development of Ivan's dialectic with the absolute antithesis of belief and disbelief. It is through the suspension, not superseding, of this antithesis that Ivan is able to develop his dialectic in The Brothers Karamazov. The progression of the idea vse pozvole~roleads from Ivan along another path to

Smerdyakov. l3 Smerdyakov, rernembering discussions that precede the beginning of the

l3 The only person wh utters the idea vse pozvoleno without having heard it first fiom Ivan is Madame Khokhlakova. Escusing her habit of naming AIeksei Fedorovich by his dirninuiti\z story time, explains to Ivan that the idea vsepomokno inspired him to commit the murder of Fyodor Kararnazov. Although the Public prosecutor defends Smerdyakov against accusations of murder, he also suggests that Smerdyakov became mad after having been taught the "thesis" vse poiwoieno (2 413). If Bakhtin elucidates the way ideas enable characters to constitute their personalities, then these ideas nevertheless can also enter consciousness as foreign objects within the plot. In The Devils Pyotr Stepanovicli States to Kirilov on the night of the latter's suicide that "you didn't eat an idea, an idea ate you" (7 520) and in The Diarv of the Wtiter Dostoevsky argues that "the cornmon people have no defense" (13 34) against the general idea of materialkm which is being brouçht to the countryside even through such means as the image of the railroad. In terms of the timeline

of the novel, the histories of the ideas vse ZL~vsekh vit~ovcrtyand vse pozvoiei~oare clearly traced in The Brothers Kararnazov. In contrast to the dernonic legion of anarchistic ideas that leads to a negative apocalypse in The Devils, the anarchistic idea vse pozvofmo in The Brothers Karamazov finds itself countered by the antithetical idea vse zn vsekh vinovaiy. This ideational contest is reflected in the development of the plot, for each idea is transmitted from one character to another in paths leading from their respective sources, Marke1 and Ivan. Whereas the idea vse zn vsekh vinovnty attempts to negotiate the laws of nature and

morality in a thesis-side reconciliation of Kant's antinomies, the idea 17sépoziwlet~o radically affirms the ethical freedom of the subject but does so from the side of the antithesis in which there is neither freedom nor morality. As Golosovker points out, Kant anticipates the amorality of the idea vse pozvo[eno when he writes that for the antithesis "moral ideas and foundations Iose any rneaning" (in Golosovker 46). Dostoevsky's dialectic exposes the mechanistic essence hidden within such an amoral position. for if Smerdyakov causally links Ivan's word with his act of murder. then this murder is not

"AIyosha," she esclaimes "coquetishly"that "I'm an old womaii. for me everythmg is permissible mpja, mie no3~one~oI"(1 275). Here, as elsewhere. the novel's main ideas receive parodic colouring through her voice. Other characters, such as Lise Khokhlakova and Kolya Krasotkin. independentlp develop ideas very similar to Ivan's idea vse pozvoleno without actudly repcating that idea. Similarly. Ivan responds to Mitya's question about whether "everything is pemitted" with the suggestion that "our father ... reasoned correctly" (2 298). Fyodor Kararnazov does not utter the idea vse pozvoleno in the novel, but his life filfils that idea's pnctical consequences. accidentally correIated to the essence of the idea that brings it about. The idea vse pozvokno enters praxis because it is aiready potentially a tool, subject to the sarne natural Iaws that are invoked in the novel to justie its own pnot-ity over mord Iaw. Nietzsche, in the Genealo~of Morals, notes that "everything is permissible" was put of the creed of the fieethinking "Society of Assassins" whom the Crusaders encountered, but whereas Nietzsche asserts that no Christian writer has "dared to follow out the labyrinthine consequences of this slogan" (287), he himself does not perceive its already vibrant, if vulgar, life in bourgeois society as Dostoevsky does in The Brothers Kararnazov. Enlightenment morality overcomes the dogrnatic Iirnits of virtue through its own bourgeois critenon of value, and ifNietzsche describes the transition frorn virtue to value as a "transvaluation" and thus fkom the point of the view of the new critenon, then Dostoevshy artistically depicts the dialectica1 movement from dogmatic virtue to an Enlightenment amorality that enslaves the subject anew through the very process of the subject's liberation. In bourgeois economics, al1 objects of desire can be assigned a quantitative value and thus can be exchanged on the market as comrnodities. "To the Enlightenrnent," as Horkheimer and Adorno write, "that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion'' (7). Bourgeois economics fulfills the ciassical age7sdream of a universal mathesis not by simply enabling numbers to represent the order of things but by establishing rules of probability to govem praxis. As early as Pascal's wager, nihilism, which for Nietzsche means "that the highest values devaluate themselves" (Will to Power 9). becomes a historical possibility because God now finds Himself entered into a probability theorem precisely as a value.'' The antithesis of belief and disbelief is absolute fiorn the point of view of belief. but when belief in God can be assiçned a numencal value in a probability theorem, disbelief and belief assume opposite positions along a single. graduated scale of values. Viewed frorn the point of view of disbelief, Nietzsche's understanding of nihilism provides insight into Ivan's ostensibly paradoxical acceptance of

14 Ivan's Devi1 considers himself to be the x in an indetermine equation and later as the "necessary minus7'(2 353, 359). It is perhaps implied that if God supplied a value for Himself. as y, then x could be solved and the mystery of problem of evil in creation as Lvell, a mathematical solution clearly possible only fiorn the Devil's point of view. God and rejection of his created worId. Even after one no longer believes in God (and Ivan's relationship to God is much more complex than simple "acceptance"), this world appears valueless precisely because it continues, by psychological reflex, to be judged by "categories rhar refer to a pwely fictitiozrs warW ( 13). Fundamental to Smerdyakov's interpretation of Ivan's idea vse pondeno is his calculation of the expected utility of the murder of Fyodor Karamazov. As he explains to Ivan Karamazov in their last interview, the one hundred and twenty thousand rubles that Fyodor owned would be bequeathed to Grushenka in his will should she choose to marry him. Fyodor has already promised her three thousand rubles simply to corne to visit her. By murdering Fyodor, Smerdyakov would not only obtain for hirnself the three thousand rubles promised to Grushenka but also protect Ivan's inhentance from Grushenka. The pnce for Ivan's financial gain is his obligation to protect his accomplice Smerdyakov, who feared he might have been suspected of the murder instead of Mitya (2 3 3 5). Furthermore, if the murder could be accomplished in such a way that Mitya would be convicted of it, then the one hundred and twenty thousand rubles would be split not three ways but only twice, with Ivan and Alyosha each receiving half of Mitya's legally fortèited share. Smerdyakov had assumed that a "clever" man such as Ivan, one who understood that "if there is no etemal God, then there is no virtue" (2 34 l), would consent without direct words to a such a profitable murder, but the logic of the action itself precludes the need for Ivan to voice any decision. Decision theory annuls decision because the choice between possible, mutually exclusive actions is dictated by the results of the calculation of self-interest : pnlightenrnent's] untruth does not consist in what its romantic enemies have always reproached it for: analytic method, return to elernent, dissolution through reflective thought; but instead in the fact that for enlightenment the process is always decided from the start. When in mathematical procedure the unhown becomes the unknown quality of an equation, this marks it as the well-known even before any value is inserted. (DiaIectic of Enlightenment 24) Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of the Enlijhtenment reduction of tliought to mathematics mirrors the Underground Man's more burlesque rendition of utilitananism's utopian maximization of advantage: "human actions.. .will be calculated then by [the laws of nature], mathematicdly, in the form of a table of logarithm, up to 108 000, and hung in the calendar" (4 469). Mathematical procedure eliminates the fkeedom of speculative thought (Adomo and Horkheimer) and of one's caprkious will (Underground an)." Smerdyakov's "unclear" dialogue with Ivan at the gate of Fyodor's house is less a "chat with a clever man" than a mystification of speaker and Iistener alike. Smerdyakov's own resolve for the murder depends on his belief that Ivan has relieved him of the Enlightenment burden of thinking for himself by acquiescing to the murder. 16 Nevertheless, at a pragmatic level, Ivan's words do not seal an unspoken contract as much as they ensure his complicity in Smerdyakov's murder afker the fact. Ivan's words express his desire for his father's death, but not a conscious decision. Smerdyakov calculates Ivan's desire for him using his own idea. Through the mechanistic gloss his idea iw pornoleno attains when it is passed on to Smerdyakov, Ivan eliminates his own freedom of action even as the idea itself affirrns the perrnissibility of al1 action. A psychoanalytic interpretation of the fatal dialogue between Ivan and Smerdyakov that emphasized Ivan's repressed desire to kill his father would thus run the tisk not only of imposing an etiology foreign to the dialectic elucidated in the novel but of insuniciently determining the cause of the murder. It is not Ivan's desire but his method of administering it that results in the murder. His desire to kill his father, which Alyosha and Smerdyakov both perceived (2 3 19, 336). not only influences his behaviour subconsciously but his mechanistic administration of desire unconsciously determines the course of later events. Smerdyakov's comment on the full extent of Fyodor's and Ivan's kinship uncovers this

I 5 The simi Iarities behveen the views of the Underground Man and those of Horkheimer and Adorno are limited to only one side of the rationalism/irrationalism debate that emerged aftrr the World War 1. Horkheimer and Adomo also analyze how an individual's irrationalism. such as the Underground Man's insistence on his "disadvantage." are esploited bl- those who are rational. Nevertheless, had the Underground Man lived during the debate he himself in rnqways anticipated at a distance of fift)i years, he would surely have put this dialcctical turn into the mouth of his "gentlemen" only to parody it through his endless paradoxes. 16 .- '-Enlightenment, according to Kant, is '...man's emergence from his self-incurred katunh.. Lmmaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without the guidance of another person"' (Dialectic of Enlightenment 8 1). IIPMHEITT~.B~I, K~K Qenop nasno~~ir,~a~oonee-c, MSO scex ne-reM ~a~6oneeHa Hero ~OXOXCWB~IU~~M, c O~HOH) c HWMH L[YUIOA-C. (3 342)17 Fyodor, as well as his three legitimate sons, are sensualists, but what textually links Ivan and Fyodor is their relationship to money. Whereas the narrator notes that Alyosha as a youth "never gave a care about at whose expense he was living" (1 57) and whereas Mitya abandons himself to sensud delights twice during fifteen-hundred-ruble, one-night orgies, the costs of Fyodor's debaucheries are never so great as to threaten his financial secunty. Fyodor allows no moral scniples to prevent his accumulation of wealth, allowing his own son Mitya to wander "without boots and with trousers hung up by one button" (2 3 88). Mitya meets Grushenka precisely to prevent her from accepting the promissory notes for money that Fyodor tried to sel1 her in his attempt to have Mitya sent to debtor's prison (1 L 15). Mitya, nghtly or wrongly, considers the three thousand rubles promised to Grushenka as his just inheritance from his deceased mother, and Smerdyakov, who is most likely Fyodor's bastard son, attains those very same rubles from a father who refuses legally to recognize him. Through his financial machinations and the neglect of his four sons, Fyodor Karamazov sunders the mythic ties between father and son only to be murdered for financial gain by his duly enlightened, bastard son Smerdyakov. '"wt as

pamcide, the novel's central metaphor for enlightenrnent, l9 evokes the myths of classical tragedy, Ivan is entançled in a mythic cycle of fate through Smerdyakov's enlightened. economic speculation. The opposition between mathematics and consciousness that the Underground Man had earlier rhetorically established permeates the events of the plot in The Brothers

'7i'~ou'remuch too clever, sir. You're fond of money. 1 knows that. You also like to ba respected, because gou're vev proud, yulikes women, beautifid women. roo niuch. but what !.ou likes most of a11 is to live in peace and cornfort and not to have to bow md scrape befort: no one - that most ofall. You won't want to spoil your lifc forever by disgracing yourself like that in count. You, sir, are more like Mr. Karmazov than any of his other children. You've got the sarne sou1 as he, you have sir" (Trans. Magarshack 2 743). I S In terms of the historical development of the dialectic of enlightenment, it is significant that Dostoevsky 's arch-bourgeois, Fyodor Karamazov, is almost entirely unaffecred by renunciation, which Adorno and Horkheimer consider the "principle of bourgeois disiltusionment" (Dialectic of Entightenment 5 7). 19 Mochulsky describes the influence Fyodorov's tork The Philosophy of the Cornmon Task." in which the relationship between fathers and sons is the central theosophical subject. hdupon Dostoevsky when he wrote The Brothers Karamazov (467). Karamazov. Nevertheless, it is impossible to interpret the events of the plot solely by the hidden determinisrn lying within the idea vse pozvoho. If the idea vse =a vsekh virtovary cannot be read empirically from the events of the plot without risking the possibility of inverting the idea, then neither can the fkeedom in the idea vse pozvole~obe erased by interpreting the murder in purely economic terms. Those characters in the novel who rely on rnathematics to determine who murdered Fyodor Kararnazov are lead to the wrong conclusion (on the empirical plane, at least) that Mitya is guilty. The public prosecutor Ippolit Kirilovich and the court investigator Nelyudov are mystified by the idea that " three plus three means six" (2 197) in their rnisplaced efforts to calculate how much money Mitya spent in two nights at Mokroe. More importantly, Ivan Karamazov considers that the drunken ietter Mitya sends to Katerina in which he outlines his intentions to kill Fyodor for the three thousand rubles he owes her to be "mathematical proof' (2 306) of his brother's guilt. Mer his first two visits to Smerdyakov and as he remembered lus interview with Smerdyakov the day before the murder, Ivan had become increasingly anxious about his possible role in the murder. When he leanis about the letter, however, this process of self-reflection is temporanly halted. EMitya killed Fyodor, as the letter demonstrates, then Smerdyakov did not and thus Ivan himself is not guilty, a "thought" which Ivan also perceived to be "mathematical" (2 326). Lf Smerdyakov's mathematical

redaction of Ivan's idea vse pozvoleno leads to the murder itself, then the "mathematical proof' of Mitya's guilt prevents Ivan from becoming conscious of his own guilt.20 Despite Smerdyakov's iogical extension of Ivan's idea vse pu-~oletto.Ivan's own guilt also cannot be entirely explained mathematicaily. Aithough Ivan provides Smerdyakov with an idea-weapon with which to murder Fyodor, Ivan himself remains a speculative philosopher and his idea vse pomolerto preserves the freedom in thought that it loses when

"Once again, Madame Khokhlakova subrnits the ideas of the major characters to parody. Having witnessed the decay of Zosirna's body? she ceases to believe in God. When Misa cornes to her for money, she esplains that she knetv for certain that he would corne. but that "there's no premonition here, there's no feeble impulses [nonon3~osenwn]towards miracles (did ouhear about Zosima?), there's only mathematics here: you could not but corne. after what happened with Katerina Ivanovna, you couldn't avoid it, it's rnathematics" (2 69). Kolya ICrasotkin similarly respects only "mathematics and the natural sciences" (2 252). it enters praxk2' Responding to an earlier suggestion from Smerdyakov before their lasr conversation that he would profit if his brother were convicted, Ivan had already decided to "sacrifice" half of his expected inheritance (thirty thousand mbles) in order to help Mitya escape on the road to Sibena. Aesthetically and ethically, Ivan is repulsed by the thought that Mitya could commit murder even though his idea vse pozvoleno sanctions cannibalism. Ivan desires to fiee himself not only fiom moraiity but fiom the banality [nournomb] of crude sensualism after al1 moral restraints on desire have disappeared. Although Ivan's devil is the incarnation of his own banality, Ivan insists that the devii is

only "one side of me ... one side of my thoughts and feelings, only the most nasty and vile" (2 347). Kant hypothetically writes that a speculative person who hesitates between accepting the thesis or the antithesis of the antinomies of reason would in daily life implicitly accept the antithesis by following his or her practical interests (Critique of Pure Reason 430). Dostoevsky's portrayal of Ivan Karamazov provides Kant's insight with a loçic. for Ivan Karamazov follows the practical dictates of self-interest by "permitting" Smerdyakov to murder his father precisely because the freedom of decision is annulled in the antithesis side of the antinomies. Over and against any logic, however, Ivan Karamazov's mental collapse remains tragic. It is Dostoevsky's Devi1 who elucidates the irrational moment of this tragedy. Dunng his elliptical account to Alyosha of his conversation with the Devil. Ivan repeats the Devil's words to him concerning his decision to confess his guilt at Mitya's trial: "You are going to perform a virtuous deed, but you don? believe in virtue - that's what angers and torments you, that's why you're so vindictive" (2 3 65, 3 66). Ivan's mental collapse does not result from the voice of conscience, but from the contradiction between his decision to pursue a virtuous course of action and his awareness that virtue does not exist. In a diaiectical extension of the idea \)se yo,-iderro, the Devil further mocks Ivan by suggesting what Ivan must have suggested to hiinself. "If you want

" Even Smerdyakov's redaction of the idea vse pornoleno cannot be reduced cornpletel>.to mathematics. Smerdyakov gives the three thousand mbtes he stole to Ivan upon the latter's request. When Ivan risks if he has given him the money because he non7believes in God. Smerdyakov replies that he does not. Moreover, he immediately questions wl~etherIvan himself understands his own idea since he wishes to give evidence against hrmself at his brother's trial. Smerdyakov, Ike Kirifov in The Devils, Iater that night hds absolute freedom in suicide. to be a swindler [MOLU~HHMZ~~T~],why do you need the sanction of tmth?" (2 36 1). Although Nietzsche and Dostoevsky begin fiom diffèrent points, they both extend the idea "everything is perrnitted" to the second principle of the Society of Assassins - "there is no tnith." At the end of Enlightenment thought, a thought driven by nihihm and one which in its demythologizing movement rejects al1 false idols, the last false idol, tnith itself, falls. The Devil's comment on the "sanction of tnith" is voiced during the Devil's parodic recounting of Ivan's youthfül poem the "Geological Cataclysm." Ivan had envisioned a future golden age in which humanity "with one voice disavowed God" (2 360) and in which man himself becomes God, but the devil exposes the lie of this utopian possibitity by suggesting that for those who have already achieved man-godhood before the amval of this age "everything is perrnitted." Throughout the novel, utopias are envisioned. Within historical time, Zosima and his fellow monks dream of the evolution of the State into its higher form, the Church. Beyond time, Ivan describes how al1 humanity will unite in one voice to sing "Thou are just" before God. Whereas the first utopia depends on a synthesis of Church and State, the universal harmony is not so much an "apocalyptic synthesis," following the tradition of ~haadaev,~as the revelation of a rnystery that remained hidden throughout human history, a mystery upon which the possibility of human history is founded. Ivan's "Grand Inquisitor," despite its narrative of world history. is also profoundly non-~e~elian?The antinomy of freedom and domination functions from the moment of the Devil's three temptations to Christ in the wildemess to the envisioned, future construction of the Tower of Babel. Even after the Grand Inquisitor, in his own

-13 Pyotr Chaadaev ends his grand narrative of universai histoq. in the "Philosophicat Lztters-' wiùi a "great apocalyptic synthesiso'( 160). or is the .'Grand Inquisitor" completelp. Kantian. nie antinomies that hction \rithin the The Brothers Karamazov are dialectical inasmuch as they are reciprocallq- relatsd and d>namicalfy moving tvithin the voices of individual characters. Moreover, the dialectic of enlightenment itself irnplies a historical progression fiom myth to enlightenment that is alttciys also a regression from enlightenrnent to myth. Whereas Adorno assertç that "as far as ive can trace it. the histo~of thought has been a dialectic of enlightenment" (Negative Dialectics 1 18) in contrast to Hegel \ho had limited the dialectic of enlightenrnent to specific historical period in the Phenomenolom-of Mind, the dialectic of the man-God (and to a lesser estent the dialectic of the God-man) as it appears in The Brothers Kararnazov develops within histonr without resolvinç the antinoni?. between freedom and domination. The symbol of the Tower of Babel suggzsts tliis perpetuall>. recurring dialectic by linking a creation myth with the future. apocalyptic utopia of the socialists. utopian moment, prophesies that the Catholic Church wiil complete humanity's tower for it (1 3 18), the antinomies are not synthesized but rationally systematized. Althouph the masses will have handed over their unbearable fieedom to the Catholic Church, men like the Grand Inquisitor will bear the burden of freedom as they administer the world. Ai1 synt hetic moments, apocalyptic revelations and world histoncal narratives no t only extend beyond the story time of the novel, but al1 utopias must remain "predictions" rather than "prophesies" in Bakhtin's distinction ("Epic and Novelt' 3 1) because of the temporal structure of the polyphonic novel. The antinomical contradictions within The Brothers Kararnazov remain raw and unresolved because the novel represents characters and actions within a "zone of maximal contact with the present (with contemporary reality) in al1 its openendedness" (1 l).*" The mathematical Links between Ivan's vse pornoleno and the murder of his father do not refùte the freedom promised in the idea itself any more than his ernpirical share in the guilt of his Father's death can confirm the idea vse rn vsekh vznovaty. On the contrary, whereas the deterministic moment inherent in the idea vse pozvokrio enacts. beyond Ivan's free will, the natural Law of self-interest even to the point of parricide, he nonetheless experiences within the sarne idea al1 the horror of freedom to the point of mental co~la~se.~~Any monological interpretation of Ivan's mental collapse rnust contend with the possibility that there is no tmth with which to explain (and thus explain away) in moral or causal terms the reason for Ivan's tragedy, even though the Devil's parodic exegesis of Ivan's poem the "Geological Cataclysm" must itself not form the basis for a inonological statement that there is no tmth. On the eve of the triai' Mitya exclaims that he is "sorry

"Dostoevsky himself in The Diarv of a Writer wites that whereas Tolstoy's novsls contain only beautifid "historical pictures" that have the "character of completedness. esactness. and definitiveness [~~KoH~~~HocT~,TOZIHOCT~M onpe~ene~~oc~b],~' the present "does not have an' of this defimtiveness" (14 203). Dostoevsky impIies here and explicitl>-elsewhere in the Di: that he is the author of this present, a materialistic present he considers to be more fiill of crisis. of the "accidental fmilp [cmaii~~oecehrefimo]" and "isolation [06oco6ire~ue]llthan the earlier. pre- emancipation, gentry epoch. He does not discuss contradictions in terms of the temporal structure of the novel as a genre, however. Bakhtin also considers that "the multileveledness and contradicto~essof social reality \vas present as an objective hct of the epoch. The epoch itseif made the polyphonic novel possible" (ProbIems 27). " It is one of the Grand Inquisitor's central theses that 'rhere is nothing and has never been anything more unbearable for man and for human society than freedom"(l 3 17). for God" (2 293) because of modem developrnents in chemistry, but if his own and Ivan's tragedies can be partially related to the Nietzschean tragedy of the death of God, then The Brothers Karamazov does not just narrate God's death. It also illuminates the beauty of Christ. In an image with antinomical implications for Nietzsche's own theory of tragedy, Ivan's Christ "walks in the midst of [the people]," endlessly affirming al1 existence through his "quiet smile of infinite compassion" (1 3 13).

1.2. Origin of the Dialectic in The Brothers Karamazov: A Formal Approach

Any foundational inquiry into the ongin of the dialectic is f?aught with paradoxes. A Heraclitean approach that justifies the methodological use of the dialectic by positing the presence of the dialectic within an object or within Being risks, on the one side. the danger of circularity and, on the other, the danger of being empirical, propositional and thus undialectical. Both sides lead to self-refùtation, A more methodoIogica1 approach that emphasizes the dialectical nature of thought only defers the probIematics of the first approach if thought itself becomes dialectics' object, as in Hegel's Science of Lo~ic,or must contend with the orninous possibility that the dialectic as a rnethod is not necessary. Hegel, who frequently describes the superstructure of the dialectic itself as circuiar. ostensibly sidesteps the question ofjustification itself when he writes that the "marner of fùmishing grounds and conditions... concems that type of proof from which the dialectical movernent is distinct and hence belongs to the process of external knowledge"

(Phenomenoio.~- of Mind 123). The demand for proof of the dialectic's truth is indeed undialectical, yet dialectical thought's comrnitment to the essence (dialectical or otherwise) of its object would seem to demand such a question. If there is a mimetic circularity inherent in Hegel's claim that "the [dialectical] method is in no way different from its object and content" (Science of Logic 19 1) or in his description of the livinj movement of dialectical notions in contrast to the static and lifeless essence of mathematical propositions that "are incapable of dealing with that sheer restiessness of life and its absolute and inherent process of differentiation" (Phenomenology 104). then dialectics is no less epistemologically necessitated in light of the non-identity of thought and substance. The movement of the negative demystifies aII that seems "familiar," for the negative's awareness of difference and its analytical process of differentiation, its "portentous power," propels the movement of living thought even towards its absolute othemess, that undialecticai "unreality" that is death (92). Dialectics thus seems necessa- because of the identity and non-identity between thought and its object and because the dialectic differentiates the contradictions in its object and mimics its object by doing so.'l If"en1ightenrnent has always taken the basic principle of myth to be anthropomorphism, the projection ont0 nature of the subjective" (Dialectic of Enlightenment 6), then the dialectic of enlightenrnent is enacted even in the process of demonstrating the necessity of dialectics, for the anthropomorphic task of each concept to penetrate an object's essence by allowing the negativity within each object to appear within the concept itself is negated by the concept's profound sense of its object's inescapable othemess. The anthropomorphism of dialectics is at the same time the negation of this anthropomorphism, for dialectical logic represents mimetically the unfolding of the spirit in world history only through the negation of al1 false mimesis between thouçht and the world. Rejecting Hegel's monumental reconciliation of subject and object and consciousness and substance, a reconciliation that reveals that the Spirit is "the true theodicy. the justification of God in history" (Philosophv of Histow 158) and thus provides the dialectic with its circular self-justification, Adorno writes that "to represent the mirnesis it supplanted, the concept has no other way than to adopt something mimetic in its own conduct, without abandoning itself' (Ne.gative Dialectics 14). The mimesis lying within thought that thought's self-reflective moment analyzes and negates is replaced only by a new mimesis, a process which would seem to replace the Hegelian idealism of the circie with that of an endless retum. Adorno nevertheless avoids such idealism by historicizing dialectics even as he insists on its historical necessity. Dismissing Hegel's daim that

'6 Ln her discussion of the similarities between Adorno's "historical images" and Benjamines "dialectical images." Susan Buck-Morss notes that in both there is a --concephial-analflical'' moment of mediation and a "representationat rnornent-' in which isolared dernents are brought '-together in suc11 a way that social reality bec[ornes] visible with them-' (Ongin of Necati\.r Dialectics 10 1, 102). dialectics is the "only true method" (Science of Lo.gic 19 1), Adorno writes that the "tmth or untruth of the dialectic is not inherent in the rnethod itself, but in its intention in the historical process" (Minima Moralia 244). Whereas Hegel's justification for the dialectic tends to emphasize the immanent existence of the dialectic in world history itself and thus entangles itself in the problematics of a Heraclitean understanding of essence, Adorno's historical connection between the "corning to be" and passing away of dialectics with the hegemonic rise and possible future faIl of bourgeois systerns and his position that dialectics is the "ontology of the wrong state of things" opens ont0 to al1 of the problematics of a

rnethodological approach to diaiectics (Neeative Dialectics 1 1, 20-27- 14 1 ). An empirical search for the dialectic in the world or in the novel must engage the problem of the origin of the dialectic or undialectically cancel itself out. The characters in The Brothers Karamazov are not silent concerning the origin of antinomies. The Devil, for exarnple, interprets the world's constitutive antinomies in cosrnological terms. An unreliable and hallucinatory source from a world where such mysterïes are presumably known, the Devil admits that he had wanted to sing his "hosamah" when Christ entered heaven but that had he, "everything on earth would immediately have been extinguished and there wouldn't be any kind of events at all" (2 359). The Devil claims to have been "appointed to negate" before time began, but that he can't quite "figure out" what exactly happened then. He lias lost "al1 ends and beginnings" (2 3 52), and thus even the Devil is unable (or unwilling) to elucidate the ongin of negation or to provide knowledje of a realm beyond tirne in which good and evil are reconciled. In a slightly less Heraclitean approach to the problem, Mitya Karamazov lyrically explores the antinomical essence of beauty, where "al1 extremes neet" and "al1 contradictions live together." Mitya notes that beauty is where "God and the devil fight," but "the field of battlr is the hearts of people" (1 156), thus suggesting both that good and evil are ontological antinomies and that these antinomies emerge in the act of perceiving beauty. Ivan Karamazov moves even hrther away frorn merely postulating ontologically based antinomies when he suggests. following Kant, that "al1 these problems [conceming the existence of God] are cornpletely unsuitable to a mind created with the understanding of only three dimensions" (1 298). Ivan is aware of the non-Euclidean geometnes that emerged afier Kant, but he nevertheless remains with Kant on the issue of the rnind's apriorï. Euclidean structuring of time and space, insistins that even if he could see two lines meeting at infinity he would not accept that they do meet. In what Golosovker considers a Kantian attempt to stay with facts rather than with the antinomies (53, Ivan also asserts that "a long time ago 1 decided not to try to understand. If1 wanted to understand something, then immediately 1 would change the facts, and 1decided to stay with the facts" (1 307). Nevertheless, Ivan abandons his intention not to try to understand when he declares that he would reject any post- apocalyptic harmony that God rnight establish and thus Ivan too raises the possibility that antinomies are part of the order of things. Finally, in a clearer example of a purely methodological approach to the antinomies in human understanding, the defence Iawyer

Fetyukovich asserts that psychoiogy is a "stick with two ends [nama O myx KOH~U~?~]''(2 445) as he inverts, proposition by proposition, the psycholoçical etiology for Mitya's crime that the public prosecutor had constr~cted.~~ Extrapolating any one of these interpretations of the antinomies would nevertheless lead to a philosophical monologue. Although Mitya's discussion of beauty has relevance for a study of aesthetics, it cannot be assumed before formal analysis that there exists an organic relationship between any theory of aesthetics the novel develops and the aesthetic form the novel assumes. The ontological question of whether the dialectic resides within the world or is a consequence of understanding or both, as ultirnately Hegel and Adorno agree despite their opposing emphases, mirrors the problematics of whether the dialectic exists in the form of The Brothers Karamazov or whether dialectical approaches impose a method foreign to that forrn- In his descriptions of the process of writing, Dostoevsky frequently makes a more or less Hegelian distinction between the "poetic" idea and the "artistic" matenalization of that idea.28 If as a wnter Dostoevsky incarnates a

27~historical materialkt approach to the antinomies that focuses on the social contradictions of post-emancipation Russia is evoked in Zosirna-s last u-ords and in the public prosecutor's spsecl~, but nowhere in the novel does such an approach receive the concreteness and esplicitness of Dostoevsky's interpretation of the histoncal uniqueness of Russia's contemporary social crises in the Diarv of a Writer. '8 Considering Dostoevsky's cornmitment to beauty over romantic iiiterpretations of the sublime and his perpetual ansiety that the artistic form of his novels inadequately represents their poetic ideas, his interpretation of the process of witing resembles more the description of Classical art than that of romantic art in Hegel's aesthetics: "It is thus that Classic Art constituted the philosophical idea in an aesthetic form, then it would seem that the task of Dostoevsky criticism would be to reverse the creative process by perceiving the original. "poetic" idea through the "artistic" form in which it has been realized.lg Nevertheless, the form itself. in its multifarious aspects as characterization, ernplotment, thematics and language. becomes transformed into material content for such criticism. Rather than sirnply beçinninç with the images themselves, the tendency of such criticism is to polernicize with the author using the character's ideas or to interpret the ideas of characters as allegones of the plot. If the metaphysical attempt to describe being transcendentally pnor to an immediate, perceptual experience of being has historically degenerated into a "peephole metaphysics" (Negative Dialectics 13S), then the peephole attempt of criticism to "see" ideas through their aesthetic form cheats when it reads the ideas of the character in a way that ignores "the image of the ~haracter."'~Dostoevsky's original poetic ideas may wel1 have been dialectical, but there is an incommensurable gap in such criticism between the critic's

absolutely perfect representation of the ideal, the final completion of the realm of Beaut?.. There neither is nor cm there ever be anything more beautih1.'- Nevertheless. the --ideas-'of Dostoevsky's noveis cannot be considered "the manifestation of spirit in its inunediate.- sensuous fom" ("Aesthetics" 352). In contrat to many interpretations of Dostoevsky-s --ideas. Llnnkr points out that Dostoevsb's ideas themselves need not be interpreted in transcendental tcrms (86- 89). Linnér notes as an example in support of hs theon that Dostoevsky considered the --ideauof The Devils to be "still more organically linked to reali~."than the idea of Crime ,and Punishrnent. His poetic "ideas" are as realistic as their artistic execution, and although die poetic "id= [FIJ~XI" or "thought [~b~cnb]''wodd seem in Dostoevsky's aesthetics to be interpretative (n-ord) rather than mimetic (image), Dostoevsk\..does descnbe the poetic idea in at least one Letter as "one or a feii- strong impressions" out of which is developed the artistic theme (word), plan and structure. Thus a non-dialectical distinction, such as the one Dostoevsky's polemical op portent C hemyshevsky makes in his anti-Hegelian dissertation The Aesthetic Relation between Art and Ralin- (374). between a writer's "reproductions" and "jridgrnents" would fàil to capture the play betxveen word and image that cmerges from a reading of Dostoevsky's various, non-sjstematic pronouncements on aesthetics. 3 Belinsiq perceived the task of criticism, although not the creative process. in such ternis. If art "is the imrnediate perception of tmth, or a thinking in images" ("The Idea of Art" 180)- then the critic must transform the artist's images into words for the reading public. In Dostoevs~.'~ account of Belinsky's ecstatic reception of his first novel "Poor People," Belinsb is quoted as saying "Do you really understand what you have witten? ....We. publicists and critics. only debate [paccqr~cnae~],we try to elucidate al1 this in words [c.mosa~u],but ou. an artist, b'. one trait, in one image bring out the essence. so that it cm be plucked by the Iiand. so that even the untliinking reader cm suddetily undsrstand eveqthing! " ("Dian.. of the Wrirer" 14. 35). 'O Bakhtin frrquently employs this phrase in man- of his works. Tiie Russian if-ordohraz. or -'image," cmalso mean "character." dialectic and the poet's idea that is filled by the concrete presence of the artist's materiai tools. Instead of reading through fom it is possible to perceive the dialectic in the form of the novel itself At the most ernpirical level of form, it is clear that the characters' voices are tinged with the texture of the dialectic. Even in the predominantly monological and matter-of-fact first section of the novel, Fyodor Karamazov develops a dialectic so ridiculous that it is a ventable parody of dialectics. In a conversation with Alyosha, Fyodor Karamazov speculates about whether there are "hooks" and a "ceiling" in hell: "Are there factories [for hooks] there?" Initially, Fyodor declares that he is prepared to believe in an "enlightened, Lutheran-style helI" that has no ceiling. He asks "in essence. isn't it al1 the same whether there is a ceiling or not?" but then quickly veers to the opposing thesis that "the accursed question consists in this!" for if there are no hooks then how will devils drag him to heIl and hang hirn there fiom the ceilin%. Modulating the dialectic one step further, he ends with a paraphrase of Voltaire: "Il faudrait les inventer. these hooks" (1 61)? Such dialectical inversions and speculative play are indicative not only of Fyodor's voice but of the voices of most of the major characters. Although Fyodor's intellectual slapstick and the dialectical play of the characters cannot be fully schematized without formalization and monologizing, there are recurrent patterns and it is possible to outline loosely the structures of specific dialectics even across different voices. Beginning with an empincal search for dialectical discourse, a structural approach proceeds to uncover the fiindamental antinomies that generate the dialectic. Characteristically, Fyodor's dialectic engages the "accursed question," the question of the existence of God. If the absolute opposition of belief and disbelief can be considered the stmctural source of a polyphonie dialectic, then the speculative play around this antinomy involves a hypertrophied, displacement process of refleksiia?* The process is hypertrophied because Dostoevshy's

- -- - - 51 Voltaire's comment "s-il n'existait paç Dieu il faudrait l'inventer" mxks the beginning of Ivan Karamazov's discussion of God (1 297) and is dialogically orchestrated a third tirne when Kotya Krasotkin repeats a Russian translation of this comment in his conversation about Voltaire with Alyosha (2 254). "The possible English equivalents *.reflection" and introspection“ both capture aspects of the Russian word refleksiin. for the process itself involves the internalization (hence reflection) of characters not only react to but anticipate beforehand others' possible objections in a process that Bakhtin calls the "loophole of consciousness and of the word" (Problems 233). Not only can the arnbiguities and paradoxes of Ivan Karamazov's rebellion and the contradictions inherent in his composing of an article on the church question and the two atheistic "poems" the "Grand Inquisitor" and the "Geological Cataclysm" be related to his self-reflective play around the issue of his beliefs and to a perpetually deferred statement of his final position on God, but even Zosima's and Alyosha's discourses are distinguished by this reflective process of absorbing others' antithetical insights. In response to Ivan's thesis that in order for one person to love another the latter must hide his or her face, Alyosha declares that Zosima had already told him that "the face of a person ofien - - prevents those inexperienced in love for people &om loving" ( 1 299)." In The Brothers Karamazov, believers and unbelievers are enlightened, not dogmatic. as they engage in the play of antinomical inversions around the question of belief, inversions which at ttieir lirnit prevent both Ivan and Alyosha from articulating any stable, monolo_gical statement of belief or disbelief within the novel. Nevertheless, grounding the dialectic of the characters in the absolute opposition of belief and disbeliefwould favour the side of belief In the transition from belief to disbelief, the theological opposition of belief and disbelief is replaced by an epistemologicaI, graduated scaie of values. In Russian Orthodoxy, acedicr [YHHHM~]is a

- - - -- opposing views that challenge one's otn. Instead of rejecting opposing views, one reserves judgrnent by preserving the antithetical moment within one's o\n unsettled thoughts. 1 am indebted to Marina Novikova-Grundt for drawing my attention to the critical p ractice of wflekslzci among mid-nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals. '' Aiyosha occasionîlly informs his interlocutors. especially Ivan aiid Rakitin. that Zosinia or Father Paisy had alreadly voiced tliese interlocutors- provocative theses. but it is ~ignfic~mttliat the "novice" Aiyosha does not once esplicitly quote Zosima or Father Pais? after tilt: hvo month hiatus in the novel. if his lack of firsthand esperience in worldly matters helps esplain liis spiritual crisis on the day of the murder, tiien the crisis itscifprovides him with spiritual esperience necessan- to live outside the tvalls of the monastery. The esperience of this crisis is far more important than the theses which initiate and resolve it. The narrator hiniself engages in a reflective play of dialectical inversions as he attempts to esplain to the reader the reason for Alyosha's behaviour afkr the corruption of Zosirna's flesh: "1 confess openiy. that it is very difficult for me to relate the clear and precise thought of that strange and undefinable minute in the life of my favourite and still so Young hero" (2 18). major sin precisely because it leads to a weakening of one's faith [~anose~iie].'' In "Life of the Elder Zosirna," Zosima declares "Drive out, my children, media" (3 92) and Mitya Aiyosha and Ivan al1 experience its enveloping hold and its spiritual consequences. Because acedin can weaken belief and at its limit leads to disbelief it represents one of the bridges between a theological and secular interpretation of the world. If nced~ais a sin that ieads to disbelief from the point of view of theology, it becornes a psychological disposition after the tragedy of God's death. It is the psychological trace that ncr~ikz leaves on the subject that makes it possible to chart epistemologicaily the subject's devaluing of the highest values. The Russian Orthodox interpretation of acedia as the cause of disbelief and Nietzsche's insistence that decadence's "supposed [moral] causes are its consequence" (Will to Power 25) ironically appear to concur in their psychological etiologies, but psychology itself remains foreign to theology even as theology anticipates psychology's insights. Interpretations of The Brothers Karamazov fkom the points of view of belief and disbelief antinornically intertwine even as they establish different origins for the antinomies. Ivan Karamazov's anthropological wonder that such a "holy" and "wise" thought as that of the "necessity of God" could "creep into the head of such a wifd and base animal as man" opens ont0 a dialectical space that is far displaced from the antinomy - - of belief, even if his disbelief is a precondition for such a claim." In a structural approach to the existence of antinomies in The Brothers Karamazov, the postulation of a fundamental antinomy generates further antinomies. The tmth content of both sides of an antinomy cannot be reduced to the problem of preventing Zosima1s discourse from finalizing Ivan's word, nor to the possibility that the ernpirical, psychological, metaphysical and mystical planes of the novel that Gessen distinguishes (308) are necessarily incornmensurate. The disparate interpretations of the noveI that the novel itself provides through the voices of its characters compete with one another. dialectically intertwining in images without synthetically cancelling one another out.

- - il 1 am indebted to Sonya Andzhanarudze for explainhg the importance of acedin in Russian Orthodos theology. 35 Heidegger emphasizes in his essay "'The Word of Nietzsche" that the concept of belief is not fundamental to Nietzsche's utterance "God is Dead": "So long as w-e understand the n.ord -Gad is dead' only as a formula of unbelief. we are thinking it theologically in the manner of apologetics. and we are renouncing al1 ciairns to what matters to Nietzsche ...-' (63). A search within the novel's dialectic for the origin of its own antinomies fails to negotiate the dialectic between form and content because it treats the novel too much as if it were a philosophical text. Having ignored the way the dialectic is represented in the novel, such a structural approach is confionted by an embarrassing fact: the majority of the discourses in the novel are not, apparently, dialectical. Not al1 of the characters speak dialectically and no character speaks dialectically al1 of the time. Although the narrator occasionalIy engages in dialectical exposition, he speaks less dialectically than most of the characters. Although he is not aIways omniscient as a third-person narrator, does not always receive information firsthand as a first-person narrator, does not always hide his personal preferences for characters, and sometimes indulges in edifying (non-dialectical) monologues about such topics as Pushkin's interpretation of Othello's jealousy (2 65), the narrator in The Brothers Karamazov is predominantly objective, narrates usually without dialectical mediation between his voice and events in the plot, and provides a coherent story in which al1 events, except for the narrative ellipsis at the moment of the murder, unproblematically unfold for the reader. Furthemore, although the assumption that the opposition between belief and disbelief is absolute encounters the antinomy that belief and disbelief are only opposites from one side, it is nevertheless possible to perceive the representation of this opposition as formally central in the novel. Such a possibility does not necessitate that the antinomies themselves be fiindamental either within the semantic space of the novel or outside it. Ifthe antinomies can be perceived within representations, then the problem for a furmal approach to the dialectic would be to understand how the antinomies could be represented. An approach to the novel's antinomies that grapples more with the problem of representation is suggested by one of Dostoevsky's own aesthetic concepts, the dvoiriik." The dvoirlik plays with such oppositions as morality/science. reality/fantasy and metaphysics/psychology as an image that does not synthesize these oppositions but makes them aesthetically productive. In terms of the ongin of the antinomies, each of these crystallized oppositions lends itself to cornplex, dialectical etiologies. One such dialectic is proposed by Myshkin in the Idiot during a conversation with Keller: "Two ideas came

16T'he dvoinik is the noun form for the English word '-the double.'' together [~~ecrocomnitcb], this ofien happens. ... 1 even sometimes think...that it is the same with al1 people, so that 1 began to forgive myself, because it's tembly difficult to stmggle with these dozrble thozrghls [n~oii~~breM~ICSIU]; hetned" (6 3 13). Myshkin's interpretation of double thoughts provides insight into Lise's conflicting desire for good and evil, Mitya's perception of beauty in both the Madoma and Sodorn, and the lovehate dynarnics between Katenna and Ivan, Katerina and Mitya, and Mitya and Grushenka. Myshkin perceives a findamental, psychological antinomy that precedes moral deliberation as ideas appear within consciousness. In The Brothers Kararnazov. the public prosecutor locates the ongin of double thoughts more in the act of perception itself in his depiction of the Karamazov nature as one that is "capable of rnixing up al1 possible contradictions and of contemplating [cosepua~b:sep - "look"] at once both abysses. the abyss of the highest ideals above us and the abyss below of stinking degradation." Whereas Adorno writes that "the dialectic advances by way of extremes, driving thoughts with the utmost consequentiality to the point where they turn back on themselves, instead of qualieng them" (Minima Moralia 86). the public prosecutor notes that "normally in life before two extrernes it is necessary to search for truth in the middle" but that in Evlitya's case it is likely that "he was on the band sincerely noble and on the other sincerely base" (2 4 16). In terms of dialectics what differentiates the public prosecutor's analysis of the Karamazov nature from Adorno's negative dialectic is the lack of movement and reciprocity between these two extremes. Nevertheless, despite the apparent existence of a non-dialectical, findamental antinomy, the dvainik as an image dialectically plays on the opposition between psychology and morality. Even though Myshkin and the public prosecutor ground rnorality in a psychological antinomy, the image ofcharacters grappling with double thoughts preserves both moral and psychological moments. Nevertheless, even if an examination of the antinomical implications of the dwirlih- sidesteps the issue of its representation, then the antinomies of the dvoitrik nevertheless cut very deeply. Developing a third dialectic that is more explicitly concemed with Ivan's and Stavrogin's actual visions of demonic doubles than Myshkin's or the public prosecutor's, Dmitry Chizhevsky considers Dostoevsky's duoinik to be no less than "one of the most significant milestones in the nineteenth-century philosophical struggle against ethical rationalism" ( 129). Kant's ethics and its nineteenth and twentieth-century philosophical offspnng rnarginalize the psychological inclinations of the moral subject through an abstract emphasis on duty and universality. In Chizhevsiq's terrns, the "how" of an ethical act can be schematized in a rationalistic ethics, but not the concrete "who" and "where" of the ethical act. As many cntics including Chizhevsky and Gessen have noted, in The Brothers Kararnazov an opposition is developed between abstract "lovers of humanity" (especially Rakitin and Myusov) and those who love "6nirxue [close ones, neighbours]." Ivan cannot be unequivocally labeled a liberal hurnanist, but he does abstractly retum his ticket to God in the narne of suffering children while refùsing to become involved in the ugly, "reptilian" quarrel between Mitya and Fyodor. According to Chizhevsky, in Kant's ethics a dualism develops between the higher dignity of the constitutive subject who, following the categorical imperative, perceives his or her moral acts to be general laws and that subject's lower, concrete, psychological inclinations ( 128). If Adorno considers that his philosophical "task" is "to use the strength of the subject to break through the fallacy

of constitutive subjectivity" (Neqative Dialectics >cc), then Ivan's hallucination can be interpreted as a materialization of life's concreteness from which the abstract. subjectively constituted Ivan constantly distances himself Extending his dialectic hrther, Chizhevsky notes that for the rationally ethical subject "the only living, i-e., nonabstract ethical motive remaining is shame" (128)''' the psychological and physiological repulsion one feels for one's own concreteness and the physical banalities of others. The Devil, who offends Ivan's "aesthetic sense" and "pride" by appearing before him in such a "modest form" (358), is thus both the incarnation of Ivan's own concrete, base inclinations and an unrelenting source of continuing shame for Ivan during his delirium. Nevertheless, neither Myshkin' s, the public prosecut or's, nor Chizhevsky 's interpretations of the dvoinik establish unproblematic foundational antinomies or a definitive causality. Furthemore, not al1 interpretations of the dvoitzik even imply a dialectical etiology. If the emergence of the Devil can be interpreted theologically as a fantastic manifestation of Ivan's troubled conscience, and psychologically (or

37 In Inner Es~erience,George Bataille also perceives the importance of sharne as a lirnit espenence in Notes from Underground (44,45). metaphysically in Hegel's sense of the didectic of double consciousnesses) as a failure to recognke oneself in one's own doubted ego, then the narrator himselfis at pains to demonstrate that the devil is oniy Ivan's hallucination and that the vividness of such hailucinations is scientifically verifiable. The narrator emphasizes the realism of the image while avoiding the problem of providing a physiological or psychological etioloa. Against a polyphonie reading of conflicting interpretations of the images in the novet, the validity of a theological interpretation of the dvoinik depends not on the fact that Ivan, in the process of becorning mad, himself confirms to Alyosha and later to a crowded courtroom that the devit truly exists. The image of the Devil already clearly evokes a theological interpretation. Each interpretation is preserved not simpIy because these interpretations emerge fiom different, equally signi@ing voices but because the image of the double crystallizes the tensions between disparate interpretations. Furthermore. the polysernic fecundity of the image of the dvuÏtzÏk is not conditional on the objectivity of the narrator's voice. Even if the narrator had provided a clinical causaiity for Ivan's hallucination (as he does earlier to explain the "miraculous" healing of mentally il1 women who receive the host 1 86, 87), his voice could not authoritatively refbte opposing causalities . ln his essay "The Short Stones of Uspensky" and in his critique of genre painting in his two reviews of art exhibitions, Dostoevsky suggests that there are many artistic impressions that may arise when gazing at an object: "in what Uspensky found only to be cornical, another would find something, perhaps, tragic, and both would be right.. ..If one unconsciously describes onty the material, then we do not find out [ys~ae~] anything" ("Short Stones of Uspensky" 393). In his argument with Uspensky here and with the painter Jakobi in the article "Exhibition at the Academy of Artists for the year 1860-6 1," Dostoevsky develops the idea that the artist who attempts to portray an object without an "intention [wanpasnewire]" reduces his art to a single impression or intention. Extending his argument concenùng the contradictions in the act of artistic perception, it is less important whether antinomies reside within objects or arise in the process of understanding [han the way contradictory impressions and interpretations are preserved in artistic images. If the structural attempt to ground the dialectic in The Brothers Karamazov in a fundamental antinomy between belief and disbelief leads to negative results because it focuses too much on the word of the novel, then a generalized theory of the imase based on an exarnination of the dvoinik threatens to free the image entirely fkom the dialectic. Although an extra-literary image signifies in a fùndamentaily dEerent way than the word. the tieedom of the literary images in Dostoevsky's novels is dependent on how the words draw these images." The word relinquishes its ability to finalize the images of The Brothers Karamazov not simply because the images are necessarily beyond words but because Dostoevsky's word dialectically disintegrates before and through the image. Hegel considers the language of "pure culture" to be precisely one of "disintegration" in which reality and thought are entirely "estranged" from one another (Phenomeno1o.w 541), but it is ironically Bakhtin's own notions of the "artistic image" and the "carnivalesque" that provide Hegel's dialectic with concrete literary forms. Although Bakhtin's notions of heteroglossia and dialogics would seem to task the word with the burden of representing every verbal moment of its own history, Bakhtin locates the social heteroglossia around the object itself and thus avoids fillinç the gap between the estranped subject and the object with a long senes of verbal representations. The prose writer encounters the "intemal contradictions inside the object itself' as the artistic word penetrates to that object, but the prose writer "witnesses as well the unfolding of social heteroglossia srri-ourrdilg the object" ("Discourse in the Novel" 275). As Bakhtin writes in ProbIems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, "dialogic relationships are absolutely impossible without logical relationships or relationships onented towards a referential object. but they are not reducible to them, and they have their own specid character" (184). Nevertheless, while avoiding the dialectics of the object in his metalinguistics, Bakhtin conceives the artistic image almost exclusively in terms of representation. In both "Discourse in the Novei" and Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin employs the terms "artistic image" and "representation" interchangeably. In the latter work, he also entangles himself in subjedobject dialectics in an attempt to define the relationship

3s Leonid Grossman depicts the visual quality of Dostoevsky's lançuage in the succinct terni "verbal portraiture [cnosec~ax~KMBO~NC~]'~ (Iioî~~~a 1 19). between characters and the author in a polyphonie novel. As the romantic ernphasis on poetic inspiration and the modemkt experiments in non-representational an illustrate, the Iiterary image need not be mimetic. Nevertheless, Bakhtin's puuling emphasis on representation in the artistic image, even as he illustrates the non-representational, heterogiossic accents wittiin artistic images, leads to insights into the mimetic form of Dostoevsiq's art precisely because it repeats and extends nineteenth-century realist aesthetics. A realistic image is a representation not because that which is represented actuaiiy exists but because the realistic word draws images as if they were derived From reality. Thus the realistic image is limited in scope to that which could have been perceived directly in reality. Dostoevslq's realism depends not just on the nineteenth- century search for types, or on the realistic novelis metonyrnic relation to extra-literary reality, but also on the orientation the author assumes in relation to the artistic materid he conceives, creates and organizes. In his struggle wîth Enlightenrnent thought. Dostoevsky subjects images once freed by the romantics fiom the burden of the neo-classical aesthetics of imitation to a universal field of representation. The possibility of a return to the Enlightenment nevertheless reveals Dostoevsky's distance fiom it, for if in the classical age "language has no other locus. no other value. than in representation" (Foucault 79), then after the classical episteme tiad been eclipsed at the beginning of the nineteenth century discourse no longer ensured the identity of representation and ontoloçy. Instead, discourse itself can be represented through the literary intoge as an object. Bakhtin notes that Dostoevsky hirnself, in his pre-exile novella "The Landlady," describes the thoughts that evolve in the sou1 of his character Ordynov as the "image of an idea." Dostoevsky not only thought "in images" in Belinsky's sense. but the "idea, in his work, becomes the sitbjecr of arlistic representatiod' (Problems 85). Whereas Ordynov desires to become the "arristin scierice," Dostoevsky and the nineteenth-century realists generally are scientists in an. Bakhtin's interpretation of voice as the "image of the character" emphasizes the representational relationship between the author and the voices in the novel.. AU of the voices of the characters in The Brothers Kararnazov, inchding the narratorts, attain their plasticity, their psychological depth, and aesthetic quality precisely because the author represents thern as images. Aithough his novels never duplicate reality, the relationship between the author and the discourses in the novel is an objective one. Under the author's objectivity, even the narrator's discourse becomes an image. As an image, the narrator's word loses its finalizing power over the other images of characters within the novel. Every utterance in Dostoevsky exists as a sensuous voice heard from within the fictional world of his novels. The aesthetic immediacy of each voice disturbs the conventional hierarchy of narrator's voice over the voices of characters without afFecting the objectivism of the realist author? Dostoevsb is a profoundly objective realist. It is not through a harmony of sounds that Dostoevsky's narrator strains to mimic a perfect, Adarnic correspondence between speech and nature, nor through the propositional language of a moralist in which the identity of Justice and Logos is assumed, nor even through the precision of an objective and simptified language of a third-person narrator who represents Being. On the contrary, the raw and prolix language of his narrator and characters is thoroughly demythologized. The artistic style of the language in what Bakhtin calls the '-art novel" loses its ontological fixity when it becomes represented as an image, and if Dostoevsky's realism transcends the realist conventions of Tolstoy's or Flaubert's novels, then this is because mimesis of consciousness displaces authorial consciousness of reality. Central to this dernythologized language is the priority of images over words. a nihilism of the eye4'

59 Bakhtin considers this relationship behveen the autlior and the characters to be subjective. not objective. Nevertheless. makmg a distinction behveen "author" and "narrator" that Bakhtin does not make, it can be argued that whereas the narrator in The Brothers Karamazov and the characters tliemselves are not always objective when they represent the events of the novel in images and clearly engage one another dialogically as subjects, the author is alkvays objective ~vhen representing the discourses in the novel. Reworking tlie subject/object opposition in a relatsd manner. Bakhtin himself acknowledges that Dostoevslq- is "objective. and bas even. right to cd1 kümself a realist.. ..Dostoevsky also objectifies the entire realm of the author's creative subjectivit?. which autocratically colors the represented world in a monologic novel, thereby making what \vas once a forrn of perception into the object of perception. In this way lie moves lis onn fonn (and the authorial subjectivity inherent in it) deeper and fdler, so that it cm no longer finds its expression in style or tone, His hero is an ideologist. The consciousness of the ideologist. nith al1 its passionate senousness~with al1 its Ioopholes, with al1 its ngor and depth and wlth ail its isolation from real existence. enters so funciamentally into the content of Dostoevsk$s novel that direct, unrnediated monologic ideologism can no longer determine its artistic fom.... His artistic methods for depicting the inner man, the 'man in man'. remin in their objectivism escmpl~for any epoch and under any ideology" ("Appendis" Problems 278). 40 In Dostoevskii and Realism, Linnér explores Dostoevsky's various pronouncements on the artist's "eye [rna~a]." From this expioration Linnér concludes both that for Dostoevsky -'the which prevents conceptual id& from Iimiting what can be said about artistic images that form the visual field of representation. In its original definition in Turgenev's novel Fathers and Children, the term "nihilism" means just such a radical empiricism. if Dostoevsky cmbe considered an irrationalist at al1 in his major novels, then his irrationalism grounds itselfin the visibly real even as it undermines the Hegelian rationality of the real. Judgments cannot finalize the images of characters in the novel because al1 judgments on reality are themselves also images within the novel."' The distance between the objective author and the discourses in the novel reflects the estrangement between reality and thought that Hegel elucidates in pure culture. Such estrangernent is felt in the "language expressing the condition of disintegration, wherein

spiritual life is rent asunder" (540). Ifthe "distraught and disintegrated sou1 is ...aware of inversion'' and is "in fact, a consciousness of absolute inversion," then Hegel's description of the language that expresses such inversions as one "full of esprit and wit" (533) inadequately describes the desolation of Dostoevsky's dernythologized word. Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque in Dostoevsky's novels provides a much more detailed account of how inversions are manifested as images in art: Crowning/decrowning [in the camival] is a dualistic ambivalent ritual. expressing the inevitability and at the same time the creative power of the shift-and-renewal. the joyBil rela~ivityof al1 structure and order, of all authority and al1 (hierarchical position) .... Ail the images of camival are dualistic; they unite within themselves both poles of change and crisis: birth and death (the image of pregnant death). blessing and curse...p raise and abuse, youth and old, top and bottom, face and backside, stupidity and wisdom. (Problems 124, 126) Bakhtin's histoncal discussion of the camival intempts his analysis of Dostoevsky's novels, but he declares that "throughout this entire digression we have not for a single moment lost sight of [Dostoevsky]" (137). Nevertheless, an explicit cornparison between artist... has a special gift: his 'eye-" and that "[what] the writer observes is already rherv before his eyes. This artist as creator is fundamentally a non-realistic concept" ( 143- 145). What is fundamental is that realism is a representation of realie-as perceived fiom point of view of the eye. 41 In an article in which Dostoevsky links one-s abili~to compose thoughts with the knowledge of one's native tongue. he writes "Langage is. nithout doubt. a fom~.a bod?.. a cover (060.~0si;al of thought (not even esplaining yet. what a thought is) ..." (13 246). Anticipating Lvhat man? critics would say later of Dostoevsky's omsensual relationship to his thoughts. Stavrogin in The Devils tells Kirilov that he "felt a new thought [no~mosasrcoaceM HOBF M~Ic~]"(7 224). Dostoevsky's novels and the carnivalistic genres reveals not oniy sirnilarities but crucial differences. There is a "relativity" between the discourses of the characters in Dostoevsiq+s novels, but it is not a joyful one. The leveling of hierarchies in such scandalous scenes as the one in which Zosima's body compts leads to the decrowning of Zosirna and the crowning of Father Ferapont, but this "rituai of crownincJdecrowning" leads to an ambivalence more tragic than merely "ambivalent laughter" (126). Moreover. antagonistic interpretations of images in The Brothers Kararnazov render them not just dualistic but dialectical, for the dualism of the image is not visible on its surface but read in the antinomical relationships between interpretations that are crystallized within the image. Bakhtin writes that the ntual laughter in the carnival is "deeply ambivalent" because such laughter was always "directed towards something higher": [Carnivalistic Ilaughter embraces both poles of change, it deals with the very process of change, with crisis itself. Combined in the act of carnival laughter are death and rebirth, negation (a srnirk) and affirmation (rejoicing iaughter). This is a profoundly universal laughter, a laughter that contains a whole outlook on the world. (137) There are many types of laughter in The Brothers Karamazov, but no laughter is ever directed towards a God who dies and is reborn in the "ail-amihilating and all-renewing time of carnival" (124). A grotesque, pathologically self-conscious laughter emerjes from images in which enlightened characters negate the ntuals of Christianity, a nezation that is duplicated in the author's God-like, objective position in relation to the images he represents. This duplication at the level of representation of the carnivalesque sacrilege in the images themselves prevents ntual from being rebom and renewed. Under the enlightened gaze at a representation, even the camival itselfbetrays its part in both ntual and Enlightenment. Instead of a ritual renewal through ritual laughter in an ambivalent camival, the seriousness of the dialectic of enlightenment enacted in the image of scanda1 preserves a element of resistance to the ritual loss of self in laughter Laughter has its costs, psychologically and metaphysically, for the reader in one terri@ing picture that Fyodor draws for Alyosha and Ivan when he is drunk on cognac. At first, he descnbes in detail to Alyosha and Ivan how one should surprise "old maidsW4'and "barefooted girls" with professions of love. Then he addresses Alyosha alone and tells hirn how he used to surprise his late mother: "Never would 1 caress her, but suddenly, when the right minute arrived, 1 would fa11 down and crawl on my knees before her, and kiss her feet." He explains that this always caused her to lauçh, but that her laugh was always "crumbly [paccbinva~i,iii],audible but not loud, nervous, and peculiar." He is perhaps describing the reader's own laughter here, although not every reader succumbs to Iaughter at this point. There are pathological consequences to such laughter, as Fyodor metafictionally describes funher: "1 knew that her illness always started that way. and that the next day she would start to shriek [urr~yrrreiisbr~nw~asb] and that this present, srnail laugh didn't mean any kind of delight, although it was deceptive because it sounded like delight." Following the stream of his own consciousness, a stream that diminishes the aesthetic distance between himself and the reader in its scandalous. cornical and contaminating flow. Fyodor then describes how a certain Belyavsky fell in love with Alyosha's mother and couned her in his own household. Belyavsky even slapped Fyodor in the face, an insult that Alyosha's mother felt very deeply: "She flew at me...'y ou tried to sel1 me to him. ..And how he gave you a blow in my presence! Never corne to me again. never, never! Go right now and challenge him to a duel ...' After that 1 took her to a monastery for some meekness, and the holy fathers lectured her there a bit." Fyodor. as if hearing the impropriety of these words only afier they have escaped hirn, then exclaims "1 swear to God. Alyosha, I never offended my shrieker. Well. only once, in the first year of out- marriage":

.. .MOiiMJXiCb YX OHa TOrAa OSeHb, OCO~~HHO~OTOPOAMYH~~~ nPâ3AHkf KI1 ~a6nmnanati Mew Torna OT ce65i B ~a6?i~e~mana. Ay~am,naE-~a sb16bm A Hee 3~yMUCTWK~! "BFUIHUI~, roBopm, BWHUIL, BOT TBOR oopiu, BOT OH. BO;. R ero CHMM~.CMOT~M me, TH ero 3a ~YAOTBOPH~IGCYmaeLub, a R BOT ceiirac Ha Hero npii ~e6emroq i~ MHe Hwcero 3a ~TOne Gyne~!... " K~KoHa yelrnena, rocnoair, nyhiam: y6bm oaa Menri Tenepb, a oHa TonbKo BcKoqlma, BcnnecHyna pytcarm, noToM snpyr 3a~pbrnapyrcam miuo, scx sa~pxcnacbhi nana Ha non ... Tah:

''~lwva~slinguistically inventive, Fyodor uses the words Ïnoveshki" and "viel'fil'ki-' for "ugl?. women" 'and "old maidsy respectively. As the editor's notes indicate in Thc Brothers Karamazov. the ttvo words are Russian diminuitives of the French words "mauvais-- and "vieille filles*(1 188). Alyosha, of course, is in tears. He "suddenly jumped fiom the table, point by point exactly as his mother had done in the story, clasped his hands, then covered his face with them, fell fkom the chair, shaking al1 over fiom a hysterical fit of sudden, trembling and silent tears," Earlier in the novel the narrator had mentioned that Alyosha had preserved a memory of his deceased mother from an early age. She was weeping and holding him up before an icon of the Virgin (1 54), perhaps the same icon Fyodor mentions above. The grotesque humour does not end with Aiyosha's tears, however. Turning to Ivan. Fyodor exclaims that "it's her, exactly like his mother then!" Ivan responds that "after al1 she is my

mother too, what do you think?" Fyodor mumbles "How is she your mother? ....What are you on about? Whose mother do you mean? ...wait, is it possible that she -.-Ah,darnn! Of course she's your mother too! Well, my friend, it was a mental derangement [îa~~e~we], like never before. I'm sorry, but I thought, Ivan,. .. . he-he-he. " Fyodor himself becomes lost in the scandalous momentum of his own humour: "A broad, half-meaningless grin spread across his face" (1 189). The enliçhtened husband and father Fyodor, who takes his wife to a monastery when he wants her to be submissive and spits on her icon to "beat mysticism out of her." who is oblivious to one son's emotional sensitivities and forgets another's relationship to his own mother, is savagely comical in this scene. The humour depends precisely on the carnivalesque inversions of superstitious beliefs about the duties of a husband and father. the sanctity of the monastery and the holiness of the icon. For the reader. the permissibility of laughter here presents no less than a cnsis ofjudgment, a testing through humour of Ivan's thesis vsepozvoleno. There are two paths to enlightenrnent possible when considering such a scandalous scene. On the one hand, one can demonstrate one's

" "She used to pray a lot then and she was especially keen on keeping the feasts of our Lad!.. She used to drive me away from her then to mu study. Well. I thought to rn>-self.let's bock that mysticism out of her. "You se," I said to her, "you see pour icon - there - \vt=lI. look, I'ni going to take it doua. Now watch me, You think it's a miracle-working icon, don-t you? But 1-m going to spit on it in front of ouand nothing wiil happen to me!'' As soon as she heard me. good Lord. 1 thought she'd kill me on the spot. But she ody jumped to her feet' threw up hrr hands. then covered her face with them, began shaking a11 over and fe11 on the floor - fil1 al1 of a heap .. . . Alyosha, Alyoshq what the matter?" (Trans. Magarshack 160). freethinking by rising above moral problematics and laughing at each burlesque tum in Fyodor's rnanic Stream of consciousness. Laughter, however, is a moment of unfreedom, a regression from Enlightenment to the ntual laughter of the carnival. On the other hand, by rernaining hard, objective and judgmental, one can resist the urge to abandon oneself to ntual laughter by condemning Fyodor as a misogynist, an atheist, or a wayward father. Such a critique betrays a trace of moral dogrnatism and is also not fully edightened. One way or the other, the coercion of laughter may overwhelm the faculty of judgment before one can deliberate about an enlightened reaction. Beyond the moral problematics of carnival laughter, however, one may also ses the portrait of Fyodor's psychologically tortured first wife Sofia Ivanovna through his words and also the images of Alyosha, Ivan and the drunken Fyodor as they sit around the table. The perceptive reader does not need to wait until the rambling Fyodor stops and realizes that Nyosha is crying to see tears begin to form in his eyes. Whether the reader Iaughs or not during Fyodor's monologue (and comedy is never antithetical to tragedy in Dostoevslq's poetics), the carnival of the enlightened word is enveloped in a broader picture whose pathos is not reducible to the Iaughter of the camivai. Adorno etucidates the eniiçhtenment's ambiguous relationship to images in Minima

The objective tendency of the Enlightenment. to wipe out the power of imajes over man, is not matched by any subjective progress on the part of enlightened thinking towards freedom fiom images. While the assault on images irresistibly demolishes. dermetaphysical Ideas, those concepts once understood as rational and genuinely attained by thought, the thinking unleashed by the Enlightenment and immunized against thinking is now becorning a second figurativeness, though without images or spontaneity. (140) The goal of the Enlightenment, fieedom fiorn images, no less guides the dialectic of enlightenment, for the dialectic, despite and because of its mirnetic moment, promises freedom fiom those conceptual idols created by the Enlightenment. The dialectic "interprets every image as writing. It shows how the admission of its falsity is to be read in the lines of its features - a confession that deprives it of its power and appropriates it for truth" (Dialectic 24). Reflecting on the carnivalesque inversions in Fyodor's monologue that culminate in the violation of bis wife's icon, it seems at first glance as if the dialectic itself represents an anti-aesthetic principle within The Brothers Karamazov that the tragic pathos of the novel's images atternpts to overcome. The escape f?om the dialectical logic of the Grand Inquisitor that Christ's kiss on the Grand hquisitor's bloodtess lips seems so beautifuily to accomplish is not the result of the kiss's negation of the rneaning of his words- As negation, this image of the kiss would be transfomed oniy into more words. On the contrary, the escape from the dialectic seems to result from power of the image to represent the dark cell in Seville, the two figures, the Grand Inquisitor's monologue and the kiss itself. That the dialectic can be represented in images at all. in the inverted forms of the scandal, in the image of the dvoinik, or in the discursive banalities of the Devil as he tries out the "new method" on Ivan, suggests that image has freed itself from the dialectic of enlightenment. Nevertheless, representation is itself a quintessentially Enlightenment principle. Whereas a philosophical attempt to evaluate the tmth of the dialectical method's penetration of Being leads to the problem of the dialectical relationship between dialectics and Being, a formal search for the presence of the dialectic in The Brothers Karamazov maintains its commitment to dialectical thought by penetrating the dialectics of form. The voices of the characters and the narrator represent the images in the plot, but the voices of the characters are themselves represented as images. If the word forfeits its finalizing, propositionai power over images in the process of negation, then the images themselves must expenence this disintegration of the word in the density of their own textures or degenerate into a monological materialism. This doubling of representation of images through words and words through images protects against the positivism lurking within both words and images and prevents them from ossifjmg, in isolation from one another. into their negative limits - silence and iconoclasm. The diaiectic of beiief that emerges in so many of the representations within the novel is thus reflected in the dialectic of enlightenrnent that operates within the form of these representations. Limiting what can enter the visual plane of the novel and what can be said about the images in that field. this eniightened form of representation negatively enables Dostoevsky to search every small corner of God's creation for the slightest trace of God. 2. Image

2.1. The Divine and the Limits of Representation

Leonid Grossman suggests that Dostoevsky read descriptions of Hans Holbein the Younger's The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (Fig. 1) in both Kararnzin's "Leners of a Russian Traveler" and in the author's preface to George Sand's La mare au diable. On their way from Baden to Geneva in August of 1867, Dostoevsky and his wife Anna Grigorevna stopped at Basel specificdy to view this painting (P;oc-roesc~~M404,405). In a Iater reminiscence, Anna Grigorevna recounts leaving her husband alone in the room with the painting and retuming fifteen to twenty minutes later to find him "riveted to the same spot in front of the painting." She writes further that "his agitated face liad a kind of dread in it, somethins 1had noticed more than once during the first moments of an epileptic seizure" (Anna Dostoevsky 134). While prefemng the serene beauty of Holbein's contemporary Raphael, Dostoevslq had profound admiration for Holbein, whom he praised, according to Anna Grigorevna's diary, as a "remarkable artist and poet" der seeirtg Holbein's Dead Chnst (in Grossrnan 406). Paradorùcally, this admiration manifests itself through his lack of direct, textual commentary on the painting. His views on the painted are dialogicaiiy refiacted through the voice of his wife and through the voices of his characters. Besides the assertion. recorded by Anna Grigorevna in her diary and repeated Iater by Myshkin in The Idiot, that

one could lose one's belief from that painting [na OT ~TOGKapTmibr y woro eue sepa Momm nponacrb] " (in Jackson 67, Co6oa~ire6 220), Dostoevsky's only sustained dialectical meditation on the painting's significance occurs through the voice of the nihilist Ippolit in the same novel: Fig. 1. Hans Holbein the Younger, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb. 152 1. Oeffentliche Kunstsamrnlung Basel, Kunstmuseum. Photo: Martin Bühler. Mer this detailed depiction, IppoIit poses the question of whether Christ's "disciples," "his fùture apostles," and "the women had followed him and stood at the cross" would have believed that he would be resurrected had they seen this portrait. Myshkin7s suggestion that "one could lose one's belief from that painting" has thus been extended to a hypothetical question concerning the beliefof his first followers, who actually saw his corpse, before a representation of that corpse. Ippolit follows this question with a dialectical meditation of the relationship between Christ and nature:

Hpirpona Mepe~MTCSiiIpM B3ïJUiAe Ha 3Ty KaPTMHY B BHne KaKOTO-TO OTPOMHOrO, HeYMOJïMMHOïO M HeMOrO 3BePR HnM, BepHee, ïOpa3nO BepHee CKa3âTb, XOTb I.1 CTPaIiHO, - B BCIae K~KO~~-HM~YA~~OM~HON MaUIMHbI ~0~efiUIer0YCT~OGCTB~, ~o~oparr6ecc~brcne~~o saxsarma, pampo6~nair norno-runa B ceon. rnyxo u Becqyecrse~~o,Benmcoe M 6ecue~~oecyuiecrso - TaKoe cyuiecrso. h-o-ropoe onHo croMno cef fi npMponbr M Bcex sa~oao~ee, ~ceM se~ncr, rco~oparr H C03~âBâ,QaCb-TO7MOXeT 6b1Tb, eDklHCTBeHH0 nXFI ODHOTO TOnbk-O nOtI BJIeHCW 3TOl-O cyuecrsa! (6 4 10, 4 1 112

' 'There was no hint of beauty in Rogozhin's picture: it is an out-and-out depiction of the body of a man who has endured endless torments even before the crucifixion - woundsytorture. beatings €rom the yards, blows fiom the populace when he was canying the cross and fell beneath it, and fuially the agony of the cross, lasting six hours (according to my calculations at Ieast). Or course it is the face of a rnanjztsr tnken dorvn fiom the cross, that isl it preserves a great deal of the wannth of life; nothing has had time to stiflen, so that suffering still lingers on the face of the dead man as thougli it were still being expenenced (this is ver). well caught by the artist); dl.the face has not been spared in the slightest: this is nature unadornedl tmly how a corpse must look. whoever it may be, after such agonies. 1 know that the Christian Church laid it dow in the first centuries that Christ's passion was not symbolic but actual, and that his body must have been wholly and entirely subject to the laws of nature on the cross. In the picture' the face is tembly mangled by btows, swollen, wîth terrible swollen, bloody bruises, the eyes open and unfocused: the whites wide open, gleaming wlth a kind of deathly, glazed lustre" (Trans. Alan Myers 430). "'~ookin~at that picture. one has the impression of nature as some enormous. implacable. dumb beast, or more precisely, rnuch more precisely? strange as it ma!. seem - in the guise of a \.rist modem machine wlzich has pointlessly seized, dismembered. and devoured. in its blind and insensible fashon, a great and pi-iceless being, a being worSi al1 of nature and its lalvs. ivorth the Ippolit amves after this senes of diaiecticai inversions to an "enormous thought": "If this very same teacher [~menb]himselfcould have seen this image on the eve of his execution, would he have ascended ont0 the cross and died as he did?" (6 4 1 1). Ippolit's interpretation of Holbein's painting is itselfan allegory of the dialectic of Enlightenrnent. Ippolit's movement from the image of nature as a "huge, de&, unfeeling animal" to the "much truerY7image of nature as a machine, who "senselessly seizes, smashes and swallows up Christ," concords fully with the direction of Enlightenment demythologization, for the animalisrn of the first image betrays a mythic anthropomorphism that is greatly diminished in the second. There remain still traces of personification in the words "seize" and "swallow up," but the Russian verb ~'c~=drobit', which can mean either "smash into pieces" or, mathematically, "reduce," both personifies nature and renders nature impersonal. Moreover, this pun exposes the mythic faralism preserved within the Eniightenment ratio. As Adorno and Horkheimer elucidate in the Dialectic of Enli.~htenment,Enlightenrnent in its critique of myth inevitably reverts to myth "which it never really knew how to elude" (27). The image of the machine preserves the arnbiguity of the Enlightenrnent's attempt to free itself from the excesses of mythic barbarisrn, for the machine of nature is more pitiiess towards everything living within it than any animalistic deity could ever be. The implications of Ippolit's description of Holbein's Dead Christ are nevertheless far more melancholy than a regression from Enlightenrnent to myth, for if mechanistic nature itself was perhaps created solely for the appearance of such a "great and priceless being" as Christ, then the myth of the resurrection of Christ must nevertheless vanish under the terrible light of the "Iaws of nature." The fonvard movement of human progress itselfis suggested in the image of nature as a machine "of the newest working ~rinciples[~osetiutero ycrpoticrsa]" (6 41 1). If the machine of nature has obliterated both human life and the divine traces in Christ's human face, then the myth of the divine has been left in mins in the movement of progress. Ippolit's contemplation of Holbein's Dead Christ is a rnelancholic gaze backwards in

entire earth - whch indeed was perhaps created solely to prepare for the advent of that bekg!" (Tram. Myers 43 0-431). human history at the beauty of a face that was once fiil1 of meaning but is now no more than "nature alone [on~anpwpona]" (6 410). If nature is mechanistic, then this is because nature is represented mechanistically. The God become man dies beneath the gaze of scientific observation. This reciprocal relationship between mechanistic nature and a nature represented mechanistically is findamental to the age that knows the world as picture. Martin Heidegger in "The Age of the World Picture," and later Foucault in his study The Order of ~hin~s,'marks the

3 Whcreas Heidegger considers Descartes' "Meditations on First P hilosop hy" as the first time that "what is to be is-,.defined as the objectiveness of representing, and tmth is first defined as the certainty of representing" (127), Foucault considers Descartes, Bacon and Cervantes as three figures located at the discontinuity behveen the Renaissance and classical epistemes (46-53). Throughout the Order of Things, Foucault archeologica1l~-qualifies Heidegger's generalizations. For Foucault, the universal grid of representation provides the conditions for ho~vledgt.in Western thought oniy until the end of the eiçhteenth centul: "The profound vocation of Classical languagt: has always been to create a table - 'a picture': "(3 11). It is the substitution of non-representational structures for a universally extensive field of representation that provides the epistemic conditions for the constitution of the netv nineteenth-century sciences of biology. philolow and economics. Until the nineteenîh centur):, however, "the personage for whom the representation eslsts. and ~vho represents himself tvithin it, recognizing hirnself therein as an image or reflection, he lvho tries together with al1 the interlacing threads of the 'representation in the form of a picture or table' - he is never to be fond in that table himself. Before the end of the eighteenth centüry. man did not exist.. ." (3 08). By contrast, in Heidegger's essay the tems "world picture" and -'representation'- are developed almgside the terrns '-subiecfzrm" and "man." Et would seem that FoucauIt's archeological deIimiting of the "picture" and the universal grid of representation to the Classical episteme and the esistence of man to the modem episteme severs Heidegger's analysis of the '-agt: of the worId picture" into hvo different, historical periods. Nevertheless, it is precisel!. in the human sciences, which together form what Foucault calls the "anthropological sleep" (340). that representation is preserved fiom the classical to the modem episteme. Man represents hself to himself endlessly because his representations never eshaust the depths of his omn being. In a section that clearly reworks Heidegger's notions, Foucault \mites that 'rhe representation one makes to oneself of tliings no longer has to deploy, in a sovereign space. the table into ~vhichthe' have been ordered: it is, for that empirical individual who is man, the phenomenon - perhaps even Iess, the appearance - of an order that now belongs to things themselves and to tiieir interior la!\-. lt is no longer their identity that beings manifest in representation. but the estemal relation the>- establisli with the human beingl(3 13). Despite the impfication that the "world picture*' and the modem subject emerge at once w-ith Descartes, Heidegger does note in his article that .'the increasingly esclusive rooting of the interpretation of the world in anthropology, tvhich has set in since the end of the eighteenth centun.. finds its expression in the fact that the fundamental stance of man in relation to what is, in its entirety, is defined as a world view ( Weltunschnztz~ng)"(1 33). Heidegger and Foucault are united in their critique of anthropology. the former defining anthropology as "that philosophical interpretation of man which espIains and evaluates whatever is, in its entirety, from the standpoint of man and in relation to man..." (133). historical emergence of "representation" and the "world picture" near the beginning of the seventeenth century. In his definition of modern subjectivity, Heidegger writes t hat "when man becomes the primary and only real mbiecttrm, that means: Man becomes that being upon which al1 that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its Being and its trutli. Man becomes the relational center of that which is as such" (128). Thus the world becomes the represented object or "picture" of the only subject, man. Man perceives and interprets the world as picture, but in doing so man as subject must assume a determined position in relation to this picture within the picture. In the dialectic of en~i~htenment,''this positioning of the subject within the picture not ody alienates man fiom the object of knowledge but threatens to objectifjr the subject, If nature has become mechanistic, then the subject must become a machine in order to know it. Having methodologically erased al1 traces of self, the scientist and the realist author risk becoming dominated by the objects they betray through domination. For the scientist cornpletely given to quantitative analysis, al1 specificity disappears in the objects under study. At the lirnit of scientific objectivity, representation itself vanishes: "In science there is no specific representation .... Representation is exchanged for the fungible - universal interchangeability" (Dialectic 10). If representation ends when al1 mimetic elements between the representing subject and the represented object have been voided in the process of quantitative analysis, then the objective observer has annulled representation only to become mimetically Iike the object of study. "The ratio which supplants mimesis is not simply its counterpart. It is itself mimesis: mimesis unto death. The subjective

Berdyaev writes that Dostoevsky "devoted the whole of his creative energy to ont: single theme- man and rnan's destiny. He was anîhropological and anthropocentric to an almost ïnespressible degree" (39). Bakhtin similarly relates the problem of representing self-consciousness in terrns of Dostoevsky-s self-proclaimed search for '-the man in man" (57, 58). In nineteenth-centun- realism generally, whether French or Russian. huntan characters are represented from ps~~chological. linguistic and socioiogical perspectives by objective authors and represent themselves througli their voices as subjects. 4 Foucault and Heidegger esplore relations with being beyond representation and corisequently are not cornrnitted to preserving the dialectic bebveen representing subject and represented object as Horkheimer and Adorno are. even in their critique of this dialectic in the Dialectic of Enliglitenment. spirit which canceis the animation of nature cmmaster a despiritualized nature only by imitating its rigidity and despiritualizing itself in tum" (57). For the realist author or genre painter, this negative limit is reached when representation degenerates into reproduction. It was this Limit, reached theoretically by Chemyshevsky in his 1855 treatise "The Aesthetic Relationship of Art to Reality." that Dostoevsky brands "daguerreotype" in his critiques of genre painting and of mechanicai. photographic reproduction:' You can't say to a person: satisQ yourself with the analysis and accumulation of material and don't think or reach any conclusions. It's the same as saying: don't look with your eyes, don't smell with your nose. Ln such a prescription there will be violence, and any violence is unnatural, not normal, criminal. ("Short Stones of Uspensky" 390) Nevertheless, Dostoevshy himself explores this limit of realism not only in his essays and articles on aesthetics but aiso in his novels. The violence of representation is hndamental to his aesthetics. The violence of representing his character's most intimate thoughts and of analyzing the images of suffenng characters is duplicated on the author himself in the process of representation. Dostoevsky thinks and Iooks when representing, but al1 authorial intentions enter the dialectic of the novel and al1 discourses submit themselves to representation from the point of view of the nihilistic eye. Although his novels never merely reproduce reality without the participation of lis word and his eye, the relationship between the author and the discourses represented in The Brothers Kararnazov remains an objective one. Although fictional, the discourses and images Dostoevsky creates are derived from reality and return to the real by remaining within the visual realm of the empirically possible. If the Enlightement observer transfurrns his or her subjectivity into objectivism, then at the limit of Dostoevsky's objectivism, characters are freed from the finalization of the authorial word and emerge as self-conscious, self- defining subjects. Self-consciousness itself, as Bakhtin argues throughout Problems of Dostoevskv's Poetics, is the dominant of representation in Dostoevshy's novels. Through the mimesis

'In his article The Eshibition at the Academy of Artists for the Year 1860- 186 1:" Dostoevsiq considers that the "photographic picture and a reflection in the rnirror are far from artist productions" (376). of consciousnesses Dostoevsky's realism once more resurrects God for an Enlightenment that had too easily cmcified Him. The suprasensory world is visible on the lininç of the consciousnesses of Dostoevsky's characters and thus becomes a possible object of knowledge precisely because the nihilism of the eye prevents the judgments of Enlightenment fiom blinding sight. For Ivan, the mystery of God lies in the fact that "the idea of the necessity of God could enter the head of such a wild and evil animal as man" ( 1 297). Dostoevsky represents not just physical but psychical man and thus God emerges once more within modemity when man's subjectivity is dissected by the representing subject. Nihilism, however, imposes severe constraints, and Dostoevsky overcomes the Enlightenment's anathema against God only by reinforcing Enlightenment epistemology. If Dostoevsky's realism constrains the scope of the objects that can be represented in his novels to what could be visibly real and thus tacitly rebukes the Grand [nquisitor's demand for conscience-enslaving miracles, then, more profoundly, the mimesis of consciousness entombs the newly reborn God within the mind of the human subject. If Christ is permitted to appear in the "Grand Inquisitor," then he exists only as the creation of Ivan. Dostoevsky represents Ivan portraying Christ in a fable and throush this refraction of representations avoids an objectifying, mythic portrayal of the divine. Although Ivan as a subject is free to create the non-realistic legend of the "Grand Inquisitor," Dostoevsky remains a realist author in The Brothers Karamazov by representing that legend throujh Ivan's voice! If God exists within the consciousness of man, then the nihilism of the eye ensures that He Himself remains unseen in the world of the realist novel. With the emergence of man as the only tme subject, the rnedieval Great Chain of Being has become inverted. The Logos that reveals itself through the signs lying within created nature to fallen, corporeal man is replaced by the invented logic by which empirical man orders nature. Although Dostoevsky's realism nesates the positivism of logic by extending the gaze of nihilisrn to consciousness, the God who created man, nevenheless.

6 In his novel Master and Mar-garita,Mikhail BuIgakov reverses this relationship between realist author and non-realist character, The Master's depiction of Chnst's crucifision and the attempt of his follower Matthew to deehim by writing an apocryphal account of hxs resurrection has the feel of an almost historical reconstxuction. whereas BuIgakov's depiction of the supematural events in Moscow that coincide with the appearance of Voland and his demonic crew does not conform to the state-sanctioned realism nith which the author polemicizes. only possesses Being through the representations of the modem subject. From this ontological inversion arises the melancholy of the modern religious poet. God's prohibition against graven images of Himself in the twentieth chapter of "Exodus" becomes an indictment of divine representation that targets the foundation of modernity. The suprasensual God has become unrepresentable precisely because the world has become known through representation. With his Dead Christ Holbein paints at the limit of Dostoevsky's realism. Ippolit's question of xhether Christ woutd have mounted the cross having seen Holbein's representation of his dead body penetrates directly to the problem of modem representation. The crucifixion of the body is duplicated in the representation of the corpse because being is now found only where the gaze of the modem subject fak Extending the dialectic lying within Ippolit's question, his hypothetical Christ violates his own tomb through his subjective gaze. With his head back, mouth open and eyes rolled back, his purple and green face showing the first signs of corruption, and his skeletal, punctured right hand frozen in paroxysm, Holbein's Dead Christ betrays no trace of His divinity. If God created man in his image, then Holbein's image of Christ is indistinguishable from that of a dead man. Indeed, as Rowlands points out, legend tells that Holbein's mode1 for the Dead Christ was the corpse of a Jew washed up from the Rhine (52). Reinhardt notes that the painting is described in the seventeenth-century catalogue of the Amerbach Collection as simply the "Portrait of a dead man with the title Jesus Christus Rex Judaeorum" (22). Under Holbein's realistic gaze, the supernatural realm ceases to infuse reality with the presence of God's Being and instead offers itself up to the gaze of the modem subject upon whom al1 being is grounded. In the eight panels that compose Holbein's Passion, the only supematural moments occur in the first as an angel descends to the praying Christ at Gesthemane. The eighth panel depicts entornbment, not resurrection. If Holbein's realism intersects with Dostoevsicy's, then Holbein nevertheless paints before modem representation imposes epistemological lirnits on itseIf The nature that swallows up Christ as a machine could only do so afler Descartes had descnbed nature as a machine. Ivan Karamazov himself seems aware that realism. if not representation explicitly, has its own a history. In his introduction to the "The Grand Inquisitor," Ivan historically situates the type of poem he will recite to Alyosha:

He notes that it was not just in "dramatic works" but also in "novellas [no~ec~~]and verses" that divine powers appeared. merdescribing a Russian rnonastery "poem [nos~~a]"much less artiess than the sixteenth-century French court plays he mentions earlier, Ivan States that "my poem would have been of that sort, had it appeared in that time" (1 3 11). Ivan's observations demarcate the same historical boundary that Heidegger and Foucault make for modem representation, for until the first half of the seventeenth century a different epistemological configuration governed what could be represented and how divine powers could be represented. Whereas Dostoevsky represents the visual real in narrative form, Holbein portrays images derived fiom Biblical narrative. It is the Word, not the Enlightenment's laws of nature, that both defines the canon of religious subjects that can be portrayed in the religious art and provides iconography with its theologicai justification. Holbein's realism does not halt before the Enlightenment's judgment of the scope of the visual real. On the contrary, Holbein and the science of Renaissance lay the visual foundations for later definitions of the real. William Ivins, for example, argues that with the emergence of linear perspective at the end of the fourteenth century there arose the ability to duplicate pictonal representations exactly following geometrical niles and to define the internal, varying and reciprocal relations of objects in three-dimensional space. Duplication of results and a geometrical representation of three-dimensional space, one which anticipated seventeenth-century geometric definitions of paralle1 lines since paralle1

''You see. the action of my poem takes place in the sixqeenth centun- and in those da>-S.as >.ou no doubt know fiom your Lessons at school, it was the custom in poeticai works to bnng heaventy powers down to earth. Not to mention Dante, in France court clerks as well as monks in monasteries perfomed plays in which the Madonna, the angels, the saints. Christ, and even God himself were broiight on the stage. In those days it vas al1 done very artlessly" (Trans. Magarshack 1 288, 289). lines meet at the vanishing point of the Renaissance picture (8), becarne fùndamental aspects of Western science after the development of linear perspective (8, 9). Linear perspective, the "most important event of the Renaissance," rationalized sight ( 13). Two hundred years before Descartes' cogito ergo mm provided a proposition for the modern subject to stand on, Renaissance artists through linear or "artificiai" perspective pictorially revolutionized Western subjectivity. Régis Debray writes that whereas the id01 "showed what a gaze withozrt a szrbject...could be," "the era of art placed a szrbjecr behilid the gaze: a human being" (55 1). Nevertheless, the subjective gaze does not emerge in al1 its ramifications at once. Although representation through linear perspective enables the subject to represent the visibly real, the presence of the iconic is preserved until at ieast the emergence of the Classical episteme. Even as the Renaissance image represents the real, the Bible provides the religious canon of events and characters that the artist can represent. During the transition in Western thought that occurs as the medieval icon gives way to the Renaissance image, a transition whose history is drawn in images, Holbein is able to paint a realistic portrait of an ahistorical Christ. If the Renaissance image represents, then the icon is a "failen fabrication" (Camille 27). Whereas representations signim being without partaking of the being signified. icons duplicate divine Being through material being. If God creates being, however. then the icon-maker can only reorder this created being. Michael Camille describes the problems for the medieval artist. himself a created being. faced with the task of fabricating an icon of t he invisible God: This restriction of representation to a second-order status explains not only the medieval artist's uncertainty with depicting certain forms that do not seem to pertain to God's creation (such as idols) but also the consistency with which he clung to archetypal models: copies of copies that forever secured hirn within a safe cycle of duplication and secondariness, adapting and altering compositions but rarely creating new ones. (35) The burden of fabrication is displaced through the duplication of existing icons. Furthennote, in the Byzantine tradition icons oRen miraculously made themselves, "outside hurnan experience and tirne," in the process of acheiropoirlai (3 0). The displacement of the process of production ont0 earlier fabrications or miraculously to the process itself ensure that the icon-maker does not directly represent the divine. It is fiom this humble ontological status that icons avoid representing God and thus attain their high sanction as medium for communication with God. Believers venerate God through the icon not by gazing at the visible image, but by receiving a vision fi-om the invisible God. As Jean-Luc Marion writes in God Without Beinp, "the icon does not result fiom a vision but provokes one," for the "gaze of the invisible, in person. aims at man. The icon regards us - it concems us, in that it aHows the intention of the invisible to occur visibly ... the icon opens in a face that gazes at our gazes in order to surmnon them to its depth (19). Blindness for the fallen matter of the icon occurs during the reception of a vision of the invisible God from the face of the fabricated icon. Through the communion of God's gaze and the worshipper's vision the visible matter of the icon itself disappears. The more beautifitl the face in the icon is, the more its power to evoke an ecstatic vision of the invisible God, the more the icon itself becomes a perfectly transparent window. The worshipper must nevertheless gaze at the icon in order to receive a vision. and this exchange of gazes invokes power relations. Beauty, as Mitya knows so well, resides no less in Sodom than in the ivadoma. Icons become idols when the worshipper mistakes the invisible God for the icon itselE No sooner does a worshipper bow before an icon he himself deified than he manipulates that idolyspower. The id01 who is born frorn the gaze of the worshipper bestows miraculous power on the worshipper. The objectivization of the icon as a means of exchange enacts the dialectic of enlightenment through the corruption of the worshipper's sight from the suprasensual beyond to the icon itself The id01 is born fiom the matter of the icon and the more beautifùl the icon, the more manifest its corporeality. The worshipper idolizes the icon when he rapes its transcendent beauty and thus denies himself the transcendence of ecstatic vision. Corporeality enables the id01 to translate the icon's dup1ication of the divine into demonic doubleness. The fabricated icon becomes alive as idol. In the corruption of the gaze fiom the suprasensual to fallen matter, the distance spanned by the worshipper's vision of the invisible God is voided by the irnrnediacy of touch. Under the violating touch of the worshipper, the id01 becomes entrapped by the very process of the worshipper's veneration and is obliged to bestow miraculous power on the worshipper. The dangers of an icon coming alive were even more penlous for three-dimensional sculptures, which is one of the reasons for medieval Christianity's iconoclastie destruction of the sculptures of antiquity (Camille 41, 42). In contrast to the tactile vivacity of sculpture, the painted icon is a far poorer duplication. From its lifelessness as fabrication ernerges the icon's power, as image, to represent. Artficial perspective replaces the two-dimensional window of the icon through which God gazes and the worshipper receives a vision with a two-dimensional image that mirrors objects in three. The Renaissance image signifies not its own, self-identical space but rnirrors space ontologically severed fiom itself The dominance of sculpture over icons ends when the image imprisons sculpture in its represented surroundings. Sculpture, not just the word, loses to painting in Leonardo da Vinci's "Paragone" (Treatise on Painting; 34, 35). The deontologized mirror of the Renaissance image shifts the locus of divine/earthly interaction away from the communication between God and the worship per to the objects represented. Whereas the icon-maker had preferred pre-existing models. human models masquerade as divine beings before the canvas of the Renaissance artist. The more sensual and realistic the image of Christ becomes in Renaissance art, the more the most perfect Being is confùsed with and replaced by the humanist ideal. The severance between representation and the object represented is spanned by the subject's empincal gaze. The near perfect correlation between Alberti3 "artificial perspective" and the eye's "natural perspective7' ensures that the geometrical relations between objects in space coincide with the viewer's perspective of these represented objects in Renaissance The order within the picture reflects the order of nature and thus fallen nature is redeemed for man and redeems man through picture. Nevertheless, this reciprocal redemption is tenuous since the translation of nature to image and then to the eye augurs the domination of the eye over nature through representation. For Bacon and the Enlightenment that emerges in the first half of the sixteenth century. knowledge is power. In the Enlightenment, humanity's freedom from the hostilities of a mythic nature that is gained when artificial perspective orders three-dimensional space at

s As Fred Leeman notes, Leonardo da Vinci was the first to distinguish behveen an artificial perspective that defines space seometrically and the natural perspective of the eye (25). One of the ways this distinction is esploited is through the technique of anarnorpiiosis. in The Ambassadors. the anarnorphic skull destroys the spatiat continuity attained through artificial perspective. the same tirne paves the way for the domination of nature and humanity by humanity. The infinite distance that opens between the surface of the painting and the vanishing point is commanded by the subject's eye, fiom whom al1 objects are assigned a size (inversely proportional to the square of their distance fiom the eye) and a relative position (dong the family of lines that extends from al1 possible points on the surface of the canvas to the eye's inverted apex, the virtual vanishing point). Nevertheless, until the Classical epsteme. the space between the vanishing point of the painting and the viewer's eye, which are the apexes of two mirrored pyramids, remains aled by the presence of resernblance. ln the Renaissance, God' s natural world offers itseIf to representation on the condition that these representations resemble it. Thus the harmony of the Renaissance episteme is preserved even as the voiceless foundations for its successor, the Classical episteme, are laid. It is only when images begin to represent images in the Classical picture that the inversion of the medieval Great Chain of Being becomes complete. Whereas Brunelleschi uses mirrors to order the space of a represented field and then paints that represented field onto an adjacent canvas, Velizquez paints himself iooking at his royal subjects who are reflected in a mirror behind the painter and his canvas in "Las Meninas" (Foucault 9- l6).' While painting within the lirnits of resemblance (Holbein's Dead Christ graphically resembles the corpse it represents), Holbein antagonizes the relationship between his painting's religious source and the physical object the painting represents. Christ. in the canonical accounts of the resurrection, lies in the grave from Good Fnday until his resurrection on Easter Sunday. The scientific precision with which Holbein depicts his dead mode1 at one moment on that weekend emphasizes the physicality of death and thus penetrates to the core of the miracle of resurrection without promising the fulfillment of that miracle. The flow of narrative is arrested by an image from that narrative. Nevertheless, the Renaissance image does not duplicate the static temporality of the icon. Although Holbein's canon of religious subjects is indistinguishable from that of the icon-

9 While borrowing the tenninology and concepts developed by Foucault in the Order of Thines. 1 have smoothed over the discontinuity he locates between the Renaissance and Classical Episteme by narroting the revolving ontological relations between God and man around the ais of religious art. The foms of this asis (icon. Renaissance image- classical image) may nevertheless appcar suddenly and thus new relations on the revolving ontological wheel ma! emerg as revo11rrior1.s. makers, his Dead Christ signifies within the temporality of Renaissance art. The etemal hypostasis of the figures in the icon is replaced by the duration of the Renaissance image. As Ippolit mentions, Christ's face is that of a person who has just been taken down fiom the cross: "[the face] preserves in itself some life and warmth ....so that in the face of the dead man suffenng seems still perceptible, as if he were still experiencing it" (6 4 10). The dynamism of the painting reflects no more than the process of the corruption of the fiesh. Representing only one instant in the decay of Christ's corpse, Holbein's Dead Christ arrests the Biblical narrative of the resurrection from which it is derived and replaces the eternity of the icon with the permanence of death. The antagonism between the painting's textual source in the Word and its realistic image of the Word become flesh is also felt in the painting's reducrd aesthetic qualities. Unlike the lush images of Mary and the Saints painted by his contemporaries, the senousness of Holbein's subject matter in the Dead Chnst lies beyond the standard critique of humanists and Protestant Reformers alike that art portraits, under the guise of a religious title, celebrate the sinful things of this world. On the contrary, Holbein avoids sensual beauty altogether in his depiction of the Dead Christ. If the science of representation deontologizes the Renaissance image, then the remnants of being at the locus of the Renaissance canvas belong to aesthetics. Through coiour, texture. shading, harmony of lines and the drarnatic staging of models, Renaissance paintings make themselves beautifid and meaningfûl as art. As aesthetic objects, they are not only sold as commodities but employed as propaganda for the Word. At the opposite limit of a humanistic art that lends divine beauty to the human face lies Holbein's Dead Christ. As JuIia Kristeva contends, Holbein's Dead Christ breaks with the iconographical traditions of German Gothic art in which moumers surro~indthe cmcii-ied Christ and thus transfigure the image of the corpse through dramatic pathos and of the Itaiian masters who portray the beauty of Christ's face even afier death (136). With less historical specificity, Ippolit contemplates the same innovation: "it seem to me that painters were in the habit of portraying Christ, both on the cross and being taken down from the cross, still with an extraordinary beauty in his face; they searched for this beauty even in the most temble moments of tonnent" (6 410). The green and purple highlights on Christ's pale, decaying face are no less a consequence of a scientific understanding of the world than the anatomical perfection Holbein achieves through the method of artificial perspective. Ippolit also remarks that there must have been people surrounding the dead body who were filled with "terrible melancholy," but that there is "not one of them in the picture" (6 41 1). This absence eliminates a narrative of mouming fiorn an objective porcrayai of the dead Christ. Ethe scientific depiction of Christ's death is silent conceming the possibility of resurrection, then the science of Holbein's arc prevents religion from employing aesthetics to propagate dogma. Ippolit's comment that "in Rogozhin7spainting there is not a word [cnoso] about beauty" (6 410) evokes the growing relationship between aesthetics and dogma in the Renaissance. Kristeva suggests that Holbein represents "severance" in the Dead Christ. Developiiig the dialectic of natural death and the divine idea which overcomes death through love. Hegel writes that the idea "God is dead" is a "suprerne alienation of the divine Idea," a "marvelous, fearsome representation, which offers to representation the deepest abyss of severance" (in Kristeva 136). Kristeva interpets this severance as a lack of motivated desire between the artist and the image of the dead body itself: "Between classicism and mannerism EHoIbein's] minimalisrn is the metaphor of severance: between life and death, meaning and nonmeaning, it is an intimate, slender response of our rnelancholia" ( 13 7). By leading representation to the "heart of that severance," Holbein does not simply represent severance, however, for the Renaissance science of painting itself signifies through severance. Holbein exploits the severance between the canvas of the Renaissance painting and the field to be represented to portray as the Biblical Christ a corpse that lies in that field. Through the severance between the surface of the canvas and the viewing subject Holbein empowers the newborn subject not only to anatomize that corpse with a disinterested gaze, but, as Ippolit does, to contemplate the meaning of the painting's nonmeaning, the senseless death of a "great and priceless beinç." In nineteenth-century realism, from the disintegrating eruiui of Flaubert's novels to the paralyzing boredom [cq~a]of Chekhov's short stories, melancholia envelopes the artistic process. For the author, melancholia arises from the severance created by the objective distance between author and text. For the reader, the objective distance of the author leaves its trace in realist art as the melancholic mood- Zosima's critique of acedicr in "Life of the Elder Zosima" thus cannot monologically be attnbuted to Dostoevsky's own voice, for the search for God in the Brothers Karamazov leads no less than Holbein's Dead Christ to the melancholic lirnits of realism. The burden of hding meaning in the world has passed fi-om an exegesis of the Word, who was with God in the beginning and through whom al1 thinçs were made, to the author's creative word. In realism, the secuIar and romantic myth of the artist as Creator is itself dismissed in the objective search for meaning in the worId, a search which at its limit leads to the representation of that which cm have no meaning. In Holbein's Dead Christ, the only words Ieft in a representation of the decaying flesh of the dead Word are the date and initiais of the painter, "MDXr(l H.H.," inscribed on the nght side of the wooden tornb.1° Having antagonized the relationship between the Word and the representation of Word, the only text that remains on the surface of the paintins is the name of the author. Nietzsche, in his critique of the falsification of the true Christ by his first followers, regrets "that no Dostoyevsky lived in the neighbourhood of this most interesting Jecnde~~f; I mean someone who could feel the thrilIing fascination of such a combination of the sublime, the sick and the childish" (The Anti-Christ 153). Dostoevsky was born too late to represent an ahistorical Christ realistically as Holbein does in the Dead Christ. Ely the nineteenth century, a realistic portrayal of Christ would have required research across the vast span of time separating Christ's historical appearance and the modem world. " Dostoevsky was very farniliar with Ernest Renan's The Life of Jesus. Furthemore, as Bakhtin argues in his essay "Epic and Novel," the novel represents reality -'in a zone of maximal contact with the present ..." (1 1). Whereas Milton in his epic Paradise Repained is able to represent the Devil's three temptations of Christ within the "absolute past" ( 15) of the epic, the Grand Inquisitor's interpretation of this same Biblical passage is shot

10 The fi-ame of the painting, on cvhich is witten the inscription "Jesus Nazarenus Res Judaeom," \vas not added until near the end of the si~9eenthcentury and thus well after Holbein-s deaih in 1543 (Kristeva 114). i 1 Bulgakov's novel Master and Margarita begins wvith a parodically nuanced conversation behveen Berlioz and Ivan about the necessity of understanding the historical conditions for the emergence of Christianity before attempting a realistic representation of Christ. Voland, the Devil. through with a historical consciousness and Ivan recites his fictional pormn'2 -.The Grand Inquisitoi' within the novel's present. Dostoevsky searches for God within the consciousnesses of modem characters, but it is only through the freedom that these characters achieve fiom the finalizing word of the narrator that their voices have the authority to evoke the presence of God. Because authonty is dialogically contested. however, no character has a privileged relation to God or to His truths. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky extends the limits of representation by passing the burden of representing the divine to his characters. Through their voices, the presence of God hovers over the events of The Brothers Karamazov in many ways and even threatens to manifest itself, thus rendering the necessity of His absence in a realist novel that much more tragic. One of the ways that God's shadow is cast over the events of the novel is the literary convention of the dream, a series of unconscious images that play on the same dialectic between psychology and theology that the hallucinatory image of the Devil does. l3 Having endured a long interrogation with the public prosecutor and the court investigator in the early hours of the rnorning at Mokroe. Mitya falls asleep and dreams that an older version of himself is being driven on a cart by a peasant. The road is covered with snow. and along the road he sees a row of women, "al1 thn and haggard." He sees a tall, poor gaunt woman in particular who is holding a cold, hungry, crying baby [nme]. As he drives past the woman and her baby, Mitya asks his coachman restlessly and repeatedly why the baby is crying (203, 204). Mitya interprets the dream as a "prophecy [npopoqecrso]" (2 296) that he must go to Siberia to Save this baby, to pur@ his sou1 through suffenng, and to sing tus hymn to God

joins this conversation and repeats the Master's poetic rendition of the intsrvien- bebveen Jcsus and Pilate as if it were his own firsthand account. .. "one of the comrnon translations for the Russian word -pernn " is --epic. 13 As Ivan and Mitya atternpt to detennine who murdered Fyodor. the possibility that the Devil murdered him is raised several times. As Golosovker notes, the public prosecutor's suggestion that there is no third murder suspect and the defence attomy-s notion that there rnay have been a sisdi person at Fyodor's estate on the day of murder also evoke the presence of the Devil ( L 3). Nevertheless. the material esistence of the Devi1 does not demonstrate the esistence of God, as the Devil himself argues when he appears in hallucinaton fonn to Ivan (2 346). The Devil's appearance in the novel only negatively evokes God's presence. from the underground mines. Nevertheless, the dream-image itself illuminates al1 the theodistic contradictions of the novel. While perceiving the drearn as a sign from God, Mitya is nevertheless pIagued by doubts about the existence of God, and the image of the starving child itself could be included as one of the "pictures" upon which Ivan justifies his rejection of God's creation. In the drearn Mitya finds Gmshenka beside him in the cart, but Ivan later informs Mitya that in Siberia they wiIl not allow hirn to rnarry: "And what am 1 going to do with my hammer underground without Grushenka? 1 will smash [pa3npo6nm] my head in with that hammer!" (2 300). Mitya must choose between Siberia and an impossibly painfùl path to saIvation or escape to herica, which in Dostoevsky's demonology is a land of swindling, Godlessness and banality. The choice between Russia and Arnex-ica represents no less than a dialectic of belief If before the murder of Fyodor Mïtya had drearnt of flight with Grushenka as the beginning of a "new life" and "resurrection" (2 49), then, afker the murder, escape to Arnetica means to "mn away from crucifixion" (2 301). Mitya is a Christ-figure whose unjust suffering in Siberia for a murder he did not commit evokes the pathos of Christ's martyrdom. God's "prophesy" to Mitya to go to Siberia thus at the same time forsakes him, for this mysterious possibility of divine communication between God and Mitya mimics Christ's utter alienation from his Father at the garden of Gethsemane and on the cross. AIyosha accordingly considers that "such a cross" (2 487) is not for Mitya and consents to Mïtya's plan to go to Arnerica precisely because he is innocent in his father's death. Nevertheless, bfitya himself is not without sin. 1s it possible that the image of the baby in the dream is textually linked to the image of the dying Ilyusha, the boy whose death may indirectly and silently be tinked to Mitya's beating of Snegiryov? Has God sent Mitya to Siberia to expiate his role in the death of Ilyusha? To judge Mitya for the death of Ilyusha smells of the casuistry that Mitya perceives in Alyosha's own sanction of escape. Mitya catches "my Alyosha being a Jesuit" in his defense of Mitya's intention to avoid the path of suffering and resurrection by escaping to America (2 486, 487). If God does speak to Mitya in the drearn of the child, then the dream itself not only vindicates Mitya's earlier assertion that "God only poses riddles [sanan saran~ii]"(1 156) but problematizes God's existence and His relationship to the Good. Moreover, not al1 drearns can viewed as signs fiom God in The Brothers Kararnazov. Lise Khokhlakova describes to Alyosha a dream in which she is lying in bed, surrounded on al1 side by demons. They slowly approach her, but she fnghtens thern by making the sign of the cross. Then she suddenly begins to "curse God." The demons rush to seize her, for "they are so @ad," but she again makes the sign of the cross and they move back. When Alyosha confesses to her that he has had the same drearn, Lise is startled and considers that the dream is not as important as the fact that "we could have the same dream" (2 287). The diaiectical opposition between suffering children and God is once more provided with an imase since Lise, who is only fourteen, is visited by demons in her sleep. Nevertheless, Lise herself seerns to have reached a postlapsarian understanding of good and evil even by the age of fourteen and vigourously defends her desire for evil. Lise herself is amused by the dream and seems even to will its appearance, for 'lit is tembly fùn, it takes one's breath away [Yxcac~oseceno, sa~~pae~]"(2 287). If the coincidence of their having the same dream can be considered rniraculous, then it is far more likely that the Devi1 has sent such a dream to Lise and Alyosha than God. Through the dialectical tensions between sufferïng children and God, between psychological and prophetic dream interpretation, and between divine and demonic sources for these dreams, the negativity of the dream-imagery in The Brothers Karamazov ensures that the presence of God can only manifest itself in an intersection with the problem of theodicy. The iconic windows that begin to open between God and the characters are smashed by the iconoclasm of the dialectic. The characters themselves recount personal experiences with the presence of God, but they can only communicate these experiences through their own, represented words. Having asked Alyosha to petition Fyodor for three thousand rubles, Mitya explains to Alyosha that he hopes for a miracle from God: "God knows my heart, He sees a11 of rny drspair. He see this whole picture [BCH) 3~y~ap~il~y]" (17 1). In a remarkable ontologicai inversion of representation, Mitya considers hirnself to be a "picture" for God to view. Debray notes that in the Byzantine tradition and in Orthodox theories of optics the icon has no depth. Nevertheless, although everything in the icon is depicted in a two- dimensional foregound, three-dimensional visior, is preserved between the surface of the icon and the worshipper's eye: "It is the distance that rays of light carrying the divine energy traverse to reach the faithfùl. The vanishing point is the eye of the spectator" (55 1, 552). In Mitya's inversion of representation, it is not his eye that is the vanishing point at the end of vision. He hirnself represents the vanishing point within a picture of the world at which God, the absolute subject, gazes. Although Mitya's hope that Fyodor will "miraculously" give hirn three thousand rubles is shattered afier he beats his father, Mitya himself considers that God was watching hirn when his father stuck his head out of the window of his house within reach of his pestle on the night of the murder: "God, as Mitya himself said afterwards, kept watch [cropoxm] over me then." While Mitya watches Fyodor, whose Adam's apple, nose, eyes and shameless grin cause him such -'personal loathing" that he "was beside himself and suddeniy seized the brass pestle from his pocket" (2 79), God watches Mitya. Not only is the final subjective gaze in this senes of representations not human but God's, but the time during which Mitya moves away from the window is passed over by an ellipsis in the narrative. The moment God is said to see, the text breaks oE Furthemore, the presence of God is evoked only through Mitya's words which are themselves representations of the author. Mitya's words present an image of God as a guard who views Mitya fiom above, but these words are themselves recorded as an image by the objective author. Thus word and image continue their endless, reciprocal negation at the limits of representation. In contrast to Mitya's profession of faith in the benevolence of God, a profession entirely in keeping with his exaggerated, Karamazov temperament and with his emotional intensity under his father's window, God's shadow is felt much more strongly where His presence seems least possible - at Ivan's third and last visit with Smerdyakov. As the setting for a conversation during which Ivan learns that his enlightened idea vse ponohro has degenerated into a sanction of parricide for financial gain, Smedyakov's room becomes a medieval labyrhth of symbols. Upon entering the room, Ivan realizes that the furniture has been rearranged since his earlier visit. The table upon which a big yellow book !ies has been placed in fiont of an old sofa. so that "the room became very crowded" (2 329). When Ivan finally hears Smerdyakov's direct confession that he murdered Fyodor, the senseless refrain "Oh, Vanka went to Peter,A won? wait for hirn" that Ivan had heard a drunken peasant sing earlier on his way to Smerdyakov's "suddeniy rang though his head" (2 33 1). Although Ivan after the interview helps this peasant, whom he had eartier Ieft lying unconscious in the snow, the rneaningless refrain itself seems to acquire a dense, symbolic meaning beyond the relationship between Ivan's abandonment of the peasant and

the idea vse pozvo[eno . Does "Peter" refer not just to St. Petersburg but the apostle at the gates of heaven? At a Iess metaphysical level, does "Vanka" represent han, who left not for Petersburg but for Moscow so that Srnerdyakov could murder Fyodor? More important than any single interpretation of the refrain are the conditions under which it is Sung and heard. The peasant is drunk and repeats the refrain many times before coltapsing. Ivan hears the refrain again "suddenly," that is, in the absence of any intemal, logical connection. The semantic density of the refrain is attained precisely through its meaningless repetition in the peasant's and Ivan's consciousness. For both, the meaning of the refrain is not consciously examined and the possibility of its repetition anses because of their lack of psychological lucidity. Shortly after Ivan hears this refrain, Smerdyakov reaches into his mattress to show hm the stolen money and thus demonstrate conclusively that he is the murderer. After calling Smerdyakov a "madman [cy~acurenuiuii]"as the latter fumbles for the money. Ivan suddenly jumps from his chair and knocks against the wall and "seemed to be stuck to it" (2 332). At a later moment in their conversation, Ivan gets up "with the obvious intention of pacinj," but because "the table barricaded his path and he had almost to crawl between the table and the wall, he ody returned to the chair and sat down açain" (2 340). Caught between the chair and the wall, Ivan is entangled in a chaotic, crowded space that mirrors the rnadness growing within him at each temfyingly clear revelation From Smerdyakov. The three thousand rubles that Smerdyakov eventually manages to show Ivan themselves acquire demonic significance as they are shifked from place to place. According to Smerdyakov, Fyodor had hidden the money behind the icons in his room upon his advice (2 334). Instead of God's presence shining from a two-dimensional icon. a three- dimensional depth opens behind the depthless icon and is occupied by money. Mammon iconoclasticaiiy hides in the place of God. When shown the "rainbow-coloured one hundred-ruble credit notes," Ivan recoils from them as if "from some repugnant. terrible reptile" (2 332). The "reptilian" credit notes suggest iconoclasm's relationship with demonism. A few moments later, Smerdyakov hides the money under a big yellow book on the table in fiont of Ivan. Ivan "mechanicalIy [M~LUP~H~~HO]"reads its title: "The Words of our Holy Father Isaac the Syrian" (2 333). The money. an enlightened means of exchange, hides as if it were a demon fnghtened by the light of day. In a room where the enlightened idea vse pornoleno is discussed, where Smerdyakov speaks directly and clearly to Ivan about the murder for the first tirne, and in which credit notes transfonn icons and "The Words of our Holy Father Isaac the Syrian" into mere places of security, Enlightenment and demonism have become difficult to distinguish. Whereas the narrator speculates that "if someone had opened the door now and from the threshold had looked at them, he would have concluded that they were sitting peaceably and conversing about some ordinary, although interesting, subject" (2 XS), the spatial ambiguities of the crowded room and the symbolic density of the book, the money. and the peasant's senseless refrain seem to be aspects of a medieval picture. The Renaissance image had freed the subject fiom the obscurities of medieval spaces by illuminating al1 corners of three-dimensional space and by mathematically ordering the world from the perspective of the subject's empirical eye. Whereas the hypothetical viewer perceives Ivan and Smerdyakov in an ordinary picture, Ivan and Smerdyakov are trapped in the contracted space of a room filled with a labyrinth of occult symbols. As the hypothetical viewer's gaze suggests, however, it is the act of perception, not the objects perceived, that is of critical importance. The cloistered space and each of the symbols - the peasant's Song, the title of the book, and the money - are al1 represented froni the perspective of Ivan. The narrator does not interpret the occult symbols, rendering their meanings not only open but relative to the perspective of Ivan. For Ivan, the light of revelation leads to madness. Ivan's confusion at each new relevation from Smerdyakov is paralleled by Smerdyakov's increasing awareness that Ivan had not al1 along understand their complicity in Fyodor's death. The psychological stability of the former is lost through the realization of his involvement in a crime he had tried to avoid, whereas the latter's self-confidence is shaken by the possibility that he acted alone. That night Ivan is visited by a hallucinated Devi1 and Smerdyakov commits suicide. It is only during this pathological disintegration of two personalities that God's presence is rnomentarily evoked. Ivan whispers that Smerdyakov is "a drearn," a "ghost [npmpa~]." Smerdyakov responds that there is no "ghost, except us two, and a certain third person.. ..the third one is God, it is Providence, it is here near us now. only dont look for it, you won't find it" (2 332). Not ody is God's invisible presence evoked through words and not through an objectiQing image which could not be "found" even if Ivan searched for it, but Smerdyakov later confesses that he does not believe in God (2 34 1). Smedyakov negates his own word, and images evoking a world beyond this one are refiacted through the distorted vision of Ivan. The presence of God is also evoked through Aiyosha's voice. Having chased down Ivan, who is headed to Smerdyakov's for their last interview, Alyosha tells him that it is "rzothim [~embr]" who killed Fyodor. The narrator explains that Alyosha was speaking

"as if outside himself, as if not by his will but obeying [~OBMH~RC~]some indefinable order [sene~mo]."Alyosha himself says that "God sent me to tell you this" and that "God put tkis [word] into my sou1 to Say to you" (2 307, 308). Whereas the invisible presence of God is evoked through the words of Mïtya and Smerdyakov, Alyosha's statements irnply God's active participation in the world. The negative moment of the translation of God's presence into Srnedyakov's and Mitya's discourse is lost when Alyosha repeats God's word. The narratorts remarks about the external source of Alyosha's word also seem monologically to reinforce its propositional tmth content. Indeed, Aiyosha's words in this passage represent the most positively nuanced evocation of God in al1 of The Brothers Karamazov. Nevertheless, the relationship between the discourses in this passage is not a hierarchical one fiom God (or the author) to Alyosha, for both the narrator and Ivan dialogically mediate Aiyosha's word. In addition to the hesitation suggested in his use of the subjunctive counterfactual "as if [K~K6b1]," the narrator does not confïrm the validity of Aiyosha's idea but merely descnbes Alyosha's relationship to that idea. The sensation of an idea's othemess need not imply divine ongin, as Smerdyakov's mechanical reception of Ivan's idea vse pomole~todemonstrates. Once uttered, Alyosha's word moreover enters the great dialogue of the novel and exposes itself to contradiction. mer initially interpreting Alyosha's word in relation to the appearance of the Devil, Ivan "controis himself' and exclaims to "Aleksei Fyodorovich" that he camot endure "prophets." "epileptics," and "messengers of God especially" (2 308). The theological scanda1 of representing God's speech, as is so evident in Book Three of Milton's Paradise Lost, is the possibility that even divine words can be negated. Alyosha's word "notyod accordingly seems to fa11 outside of the major dialectic of the novef, conflicting with both Zosima's notion of the universal guilt of dl and with the absolute moral freedom of Ivan's vse pozvolerro. It also seems to conflict with the sequence of events leading to Fyodor's murder and thus retains a certain semantic opacity. As with M3ya's dream God's oracular word to Alyosha is full of mystery and seerns to require further translation. Instead of interpreting the words "noryozr" as a true proposition, it is nevertheless possible to interpret their truth content in a dialogic manner. Bakhtin, who does not even ponder the possibility of a divine source in his discussion of this passage, notes that Alyosha tells Ivan that "you have said to yourself several times that you are the murderer" (2 307). Alyosha's "penetrative word," whether it is an oracular one or not, responds not to an external reality perceivable in its entirety only from a God's eye perspective but to Ivan's own intemal dialogue (Problems 255). It is the dynamics of expiation, not the murder itself. to which Aiyosha's word is directed in a process that mediates its propositional tmth content through dialogue. 1s it possible that even Dostoevsky's God speaks dialogically? In the final analysis, the words "~totyozPbelons to Aiyosha. As author-thinkers freed from the finalizing word of the narrator, Dostoevsky's characters represent God at their own peril. In the fable "The Onion," Gnishenka depicts God, Mary, angels, heaven and hell. Althought she ernphasizes that her story is a "only a fable [6acm]" and thus she does not "represent" God in the modem sense of that word, this fable is nevertheless ripe with theodistic contradictions. Grushenka recounts how an evil old wornan, whose only good deed in life had been her gift of an onion to a poor girl, dies and is cast to the "fiery lake." Her guardian ange1 receives permission from God to try to pull this evil old woman tiom the fiery lake by this same onion. When "the other sinners" see that she is rising out of the fiery lake by holding ont0 the onion extended to her by her guardian angel, they rush to

3-rab her feet and are themselves pulled upwards. As with Ivan's Orthodox interpretation of the universal harmony at the end of time, the solidarity of the simers who rise from the fiery lake transcends each of their autonomous individualities. Universal harmony is paid for by the loss of individuality, a dialectic that reflects the Slavoplde opposition between Russian unity, or sobomosl', and Western individudism. If Ivan "takes measures now" to ensure that he too will not exclaim "Thou art just, Lord" (1 308) with al1 of humanity at the end of time, then when the old woman "begins to kick away" the other sinners and insists on her exclusive right to the onion it breaks and she and al1 the other sinners faii back into the fiery Iake. Grushenka does not resolve the contradictions of an Orthodox interpretation of heaven and hei1 but infirses the mystery of these contradictions with the beauty of the fable's images. Although Ivan daims that his "Grand Inquisitor" would have resembled the rnedieval poems he describes in his foreword "had it appeared at that the" (1 3 1 l), his poem coming after what Alyosha calls his "rebellion," far more directly engages the probiem of theodicy than Grushenka's fable. The seriousness and consequence with which han, and especially Alyosha, interpret the poem's meaning is aesthetically reflected in the poem's ostensibly impossible movement from legend to the realm of realisrn. When pressed by Myosha about whether the Grand Inquisitor's belief that the prisoner is Christ is "a wild

fantasy or some mistake ..., some sort of impossible qui pro quo," han laughs and

responds that Alyosha can "accept the latter ...if modem realism has so spoiled you." Ivan suggests that the old man may have gone mad, that the "pnsoner may might have stnick him by his outward appearance," or that the prisoner may be a "delirium, the vision of a ninety-year old man before death." Ivan States that it is "al1 the same" how the Grand Inquisitor viewed the prisoner since "the matter only lies in the old man's need to speak his mind ... about that which for ninety years he has been silent" ( 1 3 19, but his portrayal of Christ throughout "The Grand Lnquisitor" is nevertheless distinguished by a reverent restraint. Christ has returned to the earth, not in "al1 his divine çloqr" as he promised he would "at the end of time," but "in the human image in which he walked among people for three years fifieen centuries earlier." If Christ has appeared in human form, then Ivan nevertheless only describes Christ's appearance in non-specific. non-sensual terms: "He silently walks among [the people] with a quiet smile of infinite compassion [cocrpana~m]. The Sun of loves bums in his heart, rays of Light, Enlightenrnent and Power flow from his eyes [LU o~eji]..." (1 3 13). Ivan's iconography is thoroughly Orthodox since he draws an image of Christ through nominalistic concepts and light metaphors. By contrast, Ivan describes the Grand Inquisitor as "ta11 and erect," with a "withered face," "sunken eyes," and "grey thick eyebrows" (1 3 14). Thus while Christ kisses the Grand Inquisitor "quietly," it is the latter's lips that are pictured as "bloodless" (1 328). Through its play of images and gazes, the poem of the "Grand Inquisitor" itself penetrates to the problem of representation. Throughout the poem Ivan describes Christ's actions in Seville and in the prison ce11 and the reactions of others to his physical appearance. The people are "drawn to him by an kresistible force" ( 1 3 13), and the Grand Inquisitor, as Ivan notes, may have mistaken the prisoner for Christ because of his appearance. Even "the rays of Light" and "his gentle smile of infinite compassion" emphasize the relationship between Christ and the people of Seville. Nevertheless, the coercion of a miraculously beautifid image is avoided since Christ has appeared only in human form. The Grand Inquisitor's remains free to reject the image of Christ. Furthemore, Ivan's refraction of Christ's beauty through the perspective of the people of Seville avoids direct portraiture. The readers neither objectify Ivan's Christ through their subjective gazes, nor are they ideologically confronted by a propagandistic image. In terms of the poem's dialectic, the Grand Inquisitor argues that Christ should have turned stones into bread in order make humanity obedient to him (2 3 16). Lfmiraculous images rob humanity of freedom, then a direct representation of Christ by an author would transform into propaçanda. Christ's silence, which is addressed in the dialectic of the "Grand Inquisitor," is also central to Ivan's neçative representation of the divine. Although Ckst remains silent in the dark prison cell, he does speak once among the people of Seville. With the humility of an icon-maker, Ivan duplicates the miraculous resurrection of Jarais' daughter and has his Christ repeat verbatim the Biblical Christ's words "'Talitha cumi' and 'the girl arose"' ( 1 3 14). In response to Christ's silence in the prison cell, the Grand Inquisitor States that Christ has corne "to meddle [~eura~b]with us," but that "you have no right to add to that which you have already said before" (1 3 14). If the Grand Inquisitor is not coerced by the image of Christ, then he is no less fiee fiom the words Christ "has already spoken" which he and those like him have "corrected" (1 325). This freedom &om both word and image is expressed together by the Grand Inquisitorts iconoclastie intention to bum Christ "for the fact that you have corne to meddle with us" (1 326). Ivan interprets the Grand Inquisitor's idea that Christ "has no right to add to that which has already been said" as the "fiindamental trait of Roman Catholicism" (1 3 15). Parodying Jesuit texts, Ivan says that "al1 that you [Christ] again proclah [~o~secr~mb]would encroach on people's freedom because it would appear as a miracle" (1 3 16). If there are relationships between Roman Catholic dogmatism and the closed semantic space of the Enlightenment systern, then Ivan nevertheless foUows this tradition by not representing Christ's word. Adorno, for example, links the histoi-ical emergence of systems in the seventeenth century with the bourgeois fear of the emancipation it had gained from scholastic ontology (Negative Dialectics 20). Eniightenment thought no sooner fiees humanity from dogma than it surrenders that hard won freedom once again to the rigours of the system. Logos is replaced by loçic. Any new word from Christ would appear not just as a miracle from the point of view of the Grand Inquisitor, but as a foundational proposition of an author who has put words in the mouth of Christ. If God's Word is Truth, then the represented word of Christ would degenerate into a monologicaI "finalizing word" or an "intention" of the realist author. Mer the ontological inversion of God and the subject in modern representation, the dogrnatic authoi-ity of the Word is replaced by the ideology of the author's word. The limits of representation can thernselves be historically associated wit h the Roman Cathotic Church's theology of the Logos, for closed, systemic models can only be negatively verified in the experimental method by the empincal eye and only geornetrically defined space guarantees for the empirical eye the existence of objects in the field of observation. The rational system and the empincal eye provide the positive conditions for knowledge by guarding against each others' excesses, even if the determinism of the metaphysical systern fell later to the Enlightenment's iconocIasm than the icon itself The Enlightenment is equally hostile to metaphysics and magic, but enlightened institutions govern through the administrative system and self-advertisement. The Grand Inquisitor himself epitomizes this ambivalence in the concept of the Enlightenment. The Grand Inquisitor is free fiom Christ's Word, but he and those like him in the Catholic Church have "corrected Christ's work and founded it on miracle, mystery and authonty" ( 1 322). His utopia of a humanity subject to the authonty of the Catholic Church is. no Iess than his dialectic, a closed systern. Nevertheless, as a fiee, enlightened individual he himself is outside this system, for only he and those who rule with him "will have taken upon ourselves the cursed knowledge of good and evil" (1 325). The Grand Inquisitor is an iconoclast, but he is also the creator of false idols. Even where no "mystery" exists and no "miracle" occurs, he plans to manufacture miracles and protect humanity from the Church's mystery in order to rnaintain "authonty." The Grand Inquisitor States that "man cannot survive [ocxasa~bcs~]without miracles, he will create for himself new miracles" ( 1 321). Rozanov suggests that these "miracles" refer to the latest "discovenes of science and, even more so, to technological inventions, which cause man such wonder in our time" (144). Whether as images cf the latest car mode1 in advertisements or as images of tractors in socialist realist propaganda, teclznoIogy no sooner liberates humanity from labour than it becomes a new magic, or "witchcrafY (1 335), to subjusate humanity. The Grand Inquisitor's "miracle" is a coercive, fabricated idol. The Grand Lnquisitor confesses

to Christ that "our mystery [~aii~a]"is that "we are not with you, but with him" ( 1 323). that is, with the Devil. Alyosha considers that the Grand Inquisitor's whole "secret [ce~pe~]''is that " he doesn't believe in God." Ivan concurs, replying that "finally you have guessed it" (1 327), and it is clear that the Grand Inquisitor considers part of the Roman Catholic Church's "mystery" to be the idea that "beyond the grave they [the peopIe] will meet only death" (1 325). Between the Grand Inquisitor's own confession and Alyosha's insight, Enlightenment and demonism once again intersect. The Grand Inquisitor. an atheist who promises eternal happiness in order to pacify a subjugated humanity, provides his subjects with false idols while preventing them from learning the lie of the ideology that is employed to govern them. The Grand Inquisitor does not fdl under Horkheimer's and Adorno's criticism of an unreflective Enlightenment. On the contrary, the Grand Inquisitor is enlightened precisely because he sees through the representations he creates. He deceives others but not himself Mystery has transformed into an ideology of power and miracle into a false spectacle of Stones turning into bread that is ritually enacted to relieve humanity of its freedom, but the Grand Inquisitor believes neither the words of that ideology nor is mystified by the fabricated images. It is the Grand Inquisitor's determination to bear the burden of fkeedom, and with it suffering and unhappiness, that lends his own portrait tragic colours. If the Grand Inquisitor is enlightened because he does not objectiSl himseif before the reified objects with which he objectifies others, then Ivan's portrayal of Christ, from whose eyes "Enlightenmentl' flows (1 3 lj), is negative in tems of modern representation. At the Ievel of ideology, the image of the Russian Orthodox Christ seems to vanquish the Roman Catholic Logos when Christ's kiss annuls the Grand Inquisitor's DNn'. Furthermore, in terms of the dialectic of belief, the Grand Inquisitor's word and the image of Christ reflect the choice before Ivan, Alyosha and the reader between disbelief and belief respectively, but the image of Christ cannot enter a dialect with the word of the Grand Inquisitor without itself transforming into a word. The negation of the word is met by the affirmation of the image but for that very reason the image cannot negate the word. Christ's gentle kiss has the same aura of love and affirmation that his "çentIe srnile of infinite compassion" does, and the problem of evil raised earlier by Ivan is not so much how God pemits evil in the world, but how judgments against those who have caused innocent children to suffer could be passed over in the name of a universal harmony. Moreover, although the Grand Inquisitor releases Christ instead of burning him as a heretic and although Christ's kiss "burns in his heart," the "old man stays with his former idea" (1 329) and thus has not been persuaded by Christ's kiss. The image of the kiss cannot dissolve the dialectic. Beyond an interpretation of the semantics of the kiss, any ideological meaning of Christ's appearance has been negated by the representational play of word and image. If the Grand Inquisitor's iconoclastie logic cannot shatter the image of a Christ who remains silent, then neither has Christ, despite his human fom, been provided with a stable, visual image that could be objectified as a portrait for the subjective gaze or deployed against the viewing subject as propaganda. Furthermore, the meaning of the image of Christ cannot be translated into an ideology, even an ideology of the image, without entering the cross-section of the Grand Inquisitor's dialectic. If the word tends towards detenninism in the Grand Inquisitor's confession to Christ, then the image of Chnst fieely invites inexhaustible interpretation. This freedom is felt by Alyosha's first, confiised words after the poem ends: "Your poern is in praise of Jesus, not

a criticism [xyrra] ...as you had wanted" (1 326). The poem can be interpreted as either praise or criticism, but neither interpretation imposes itselfdirectly from the image of Christ. If a rniraculous word or image from Christ would eliminate freedom in the diaiectic of belief, then a positively represented word or image of Christ from a realist author would not only betray that author's opinion on the question of belief and threaten to degenerate into an apology for that opinion - it would objectifi God. Nevertheless, Ivan's portraya1 of Christ is cIearIy not completely realistic even if his representation of Christ is negative. Besides the fictional premise of Christ's retum to Seville and the miraculous raising of the girl with the words "talitha cumi," Ivan's image of Christ attains its beauty through the awe and wonder of those who gaze upon him. As Ivan introduces Christ to Aiyosha, he comments that "he appeared quietly, inconspicuously, but everyone - and this is what is so strange - recognizes him. That might have been o or no 6b16bi~blone of the best places in my poem, that is, exactly why they recognized him" (1 3 13). Ivan's "might have been" passes over in silence the miracle of the incarnation of the Word in hurnan flesh. [t is precisely the possibility of this miracle that is problematized in Holbein's Dead Christ. As he ponders the belief of Christ's disciples before Holbein's Dead Chnst, Ippolit poses the question of how the laws of nature could be overcome by the dead man "who had conquered nature during his own life, to whom nature had subrnitted, and who exclaimed: 'talitha cumi' - and the girl arose, 'Lazarus, corne out' - and out came the dead man?" (6 410). Although Lppolit esplicitly engages the miracle of the resurrection of the flesh, by placing Holbein's Dead Christ before Christ himself and his disciples Ippolit implicitly questions the miracle of the incarnation. Theologically and aesthetically in Dostoevsky's wntings, the miracle of the incarnation no less fundamental than that of the resurrection: In the world there is only one positively beautifid person [nuuo] - Christ, so that the appearance of this immeasurably, infinitely beautiful person is already an infinite miracle. (Al1 of John's Gospel in this sense; he finds the whole miracle in the incarnation [~omouie~~e],in the appearance of the beautiful.) (Letter to S. A. Ivanovna 15 343, 344)'' Neither having provided the reader with a direct gaze at his image of Christ nor having explained why the people of Seville recognize the divine in Christ, Ivan leaves open the question of how the realist could represent the divine in the human face of Christ. Holbein paints an image where Ivan remains silent. Having fieed itself fiom the Word and the aesthetic coercion of physical beauty, Holbein's Dead Christ represents the flesh of Christ without a visual trace of the divine Word. The antagonism between a representation of the Word and the textual source for such representations in the Word thus reaches its theological limit in Holbein's Dead Christ. Despite the prohibition asainst hases in th? Old Testament, the miracle of the incarnation itself had provided early Christianity with a New Testament justification for iconography. Man was made in the "image of God" and Christ came to earth in the fonn of man. Thus, as Camille writes, "the creation myth - that man was made 'in the image of God' - gave credence to the assumption that Christ could be portrayed in his divine condescension of imagehood" (34). By emphasizing the image of Christ's decayinç flesh over the Word incarnated in that flesh, Holbein's Dead Christ problematizes the iconographicjustiftcation for representations of the divine by questioning the possibility of the miracle of incarnation. The miracle of the incarnation is no less central to the portrayal of the divine throughout The Brothers Karamazov. for in that miracle lies the mystery of the relationship between the divine and the earttily realms. While "The Grand Inquisitor" is a poem in which a portrayal of Christ approaches the realm of realism, The Brothers Karamazov is a realist novel that probes the Iimits of representation before the divine. If the divine cannot be represented directly, then it is nevertheless possible that the empirical events of The Brothers Karamazov represent the divine allegorically. The character Father Ferapont anticipates many Dostoevsky critics by already interpreting the reality depicted in the novel in this manner. He claims to see not only devils under Zosima's cassock. but often the "holy spirit" [c~moiinyx] in the fonn of a dove. and the

!4 The Grand Inquisitor considers the miracle of the three temptations of the Devil to Christ also . ,. in these ternis: "it is precisely in the appearance of these îbee questions that the miracle lies" ( 1 3 17). "Holy Spirit7' [Csnro~gm]in the foms of swallows, goldfinches and tom-tits (2 224). He is even visited by Christ: "Do you see those two boughs? At night they are Christ's hands reaching for me and searching for me" (1 225). Father Ferapont is afiaid that Christ will take him to heaven dive as he did Elijah. Nevertheless, to perceive this world as a representation of the higher world leads, as Cascardi suggests in his discussion of Ippolit's interpretation of Holbein's painting (15 1, 152), to the nihilism which Nietzsche locates at the center ofChristian morality. In Christian nihilism, the fallen world is condemned by the values of the higher, perfect world: "Moral value judgments are ways of passing sentence, negations: morality is a way of turning one's back on the will to existence" (Will to Power 1 1). Not only is Father Ferapont an extreme aescetic who at one point contemplates changing his current diet of monastery bread for wild mushrooms and bemes, but he is also a tyrannicd moralist who condemns the monks at the monastery for not "giving up their bread because they are in bondage to the devil" (1 223). In contrast to Father Ferapont, Ivan's Chnst compassionately srniles at those who approach him and Zosima and his brother Marke1 consider this world already to be a "paradise." Lise Khokhlakova takes this affirmation of life to its theodistic breaking-point when she tells Alyosha about a book she read in which a Jew nails a four-year-old boy to a wall and enjoys his moans for four hours. Mer proclairning the enjoyment of the boy's moans "good," Lise says that she sometimes imagines that it was she herself who crucified the child and that she ate pineapple compote as he çroaned (2 288). If Christ appeared in the flesh on earth as a perfectly beautiful being, then the fallen matter of this world must be transfigured in imitation of that perfection. Events and people in this world are not representations of a higher world but already contain the messianic potential to be perfectly beautiful and good in thernselves. An allegorical interpretation of the events of the novel must confront the problematics of dualisrn raised by the corruption of Zosima's flesh. As Cascardi points out conceming Ippolit's interpretation of Holbein's Dead Chnst, "the question of the failure to recognize Christ is posed in relation to apairzting of the cmcified Christ because the problem itself lies in a desire to read the body as a 'representation' of the soul" (1 52). Those who interpret the corruption of Zosima's flesh as a sign of the quality of his soul are led either to a crisis of faith or to aesceticism. Following the logic of dualism, either Zosima was a saint and thus the corruption of his flesh indicates that there is nothing beyond death even for those as holy as he, or Zosima was not a saint and the impossibly quick corruption of his body "violates even the laws of nature" and thus indicates that "God's judgment is not man's" (2 13). Madame Khokhlakova accepts, if only fleetingly, the Iogic of the first possibility by becorning a "realist [peanircr~a]"and by accepting " mathematics" and "the natural sciences" (2 69-7 1). Many of the rnonks and visitors at the monastery adopt the second possibility, criticizing Zosima's teaching that "life is a great joy" and condernning his failure to be "strict" at fasts (2 12). mer chasing away al1 of the devils lurking in Zosima's cell, Father Ferapont condernns the departed Zosima for his fondness of the sweets and tea that society ladies would bnng him (2 15). Alyosha's despondency is much more complex than either atheism or aesceticism. The narrator records that Alyosha pondered why Providence hid its "finger [nepc~]'at the most necessary moment' ...as if it wanted to submit itself to the blind, dumb, merciless laws of nature" (2 20). Following Ivan's exarnple. Alyosha says to Rakitin that "1 am not rebelling against God. I simply 'don't accept his world"' (2 22). As with Ivan's rebellion, this rejection of the world and acceptance of a God who may not even exist is a much more finely developed form of Nietzschean nihilism than Ferapont's aesceticism. Neverthefess, Like Ivan, the despondent Alyosha conceives the world and God in opposition to one another. Interpreted in a dualistic marmer, Holbein's Dead Christ denies the viewing subject a pictorial space in which the methodological schism between an understanding of the earthly and divine worlds could be reconciled. There is only one reality depicted in Holbein's Dead Christ. At the limit of this severance between the divine and the human, the dead Christ becomes nothing more than a memetzto rnor~.'~Just as Ippolit repeats this

l5 The contrast behveen Holbein's Dead Christ and The Ambassadors is striking in terms of their respective treatments of death. Whereas in the former painting the corpse of Christ cari be interpeted as a memento mon', in The Ambassadors an anamorphic skull lies in Front of the curtain in the opulent roorn of the hvo men of the world. Behind the curtaiq in the top Iefi corner of the canvas, is a hidden portrait of Christ hanging on the cross. While the dead body of Christ on the cross reflects and reinforces the significance of the anamorphic memento mori and thus denies an absolute dualism behveen the perfect, divine realm and the vanities of the faIlen world, the screen does separate hvo spaces and thus pictorially evokes this dualism. opposition of soul and body by pfaying nature and the "perfect being" Christ dialectically against one another (Cascardi 152), those who interpret the corruption of Zosima's flesh as sign of his holiness fa11 into the nihilistic patterns of dualism. Nevertheless. the possibility that Zosima's flesh rnight not have corrupted need not be reducible to a sign of his saintliness, but opens ont0 the miracle of the incarnation of the divine in the flesh. Even at Zosima's burial, the debate concerning the significance of incormptible flesh betrays an Enlightenrnent understanding of the arbitrariness between sign and referent. Thus Father Joseph defends Zosima against his accusers by arguing that the "main sign of the glorification of the saved" is not the corruptibility of the flesh, but the "colour of the bones afier the body has laid many years in the earth" (2 1 1, 12). The mystery of the incarnation lies far deeper than an arbitrary system of signs between signiQing body and signified soul. Kristeva provides a glimpse of the complexity of Orthodox interpretations of Christ's death and its relevance for Orthodox iconography: Moreover, the pneumatic conception of the Eucharist, expounded for instance by Maximus the Confesser (twelfth century), leads one to believe that Christ was cri the same tirne deified nid cnicified, that death on the cross is imate in life and living. On that basis painters permitted themselves to present Christ's death on the Cross - because death was living, the dead body was an incorruptible body that could be kept by the Church as image mzd reality. (2 12) Christ's body could thus be preserved and could be represented iconographically after death not simply as a sign of his departed soul but as an "image" and as a "reality." The sou1 is not caged in the sifil body but miracuiously one with that body. To interpret the incomptibility of the body as a sign of a saint's great aesceticism leads to the paradox that the same flesh abnegated in life becomes the means by which that departed soul is celebrated after life. Interpreting the miracle of the incarnation less dualistically, it can be argued that the miraculous preservation of a saint's dead body reflects the perfect incarnation of his beautifùI soul in his flesh. If dualism leads to aesceticism, atheism and nihilism because it severs the unknowable and unrepresentable higher world from the concrete, fallen one, then Dostoevsky nevertheless does not represent the world of The Brothers Karamazov as if it were already paradise. The incarnation of the soul in the body remains a miracle and, in an age that knows the world as picture, miracles cannot be directly represented. The narrator himself comments on the relationship between miracles and realism in the chapter "Elders" of The Brothers Kararnazov, writing that an "unbelieving" realist will "sooner not believe his senses than admit a miracle as a fact" and that "if a realist does accept a miracle" it will only be as a hitherto unknown fact. By contrast, "if a realist once believes. then precisely because of his realism he wili immediately accept any miracle." This dialectic of belief, although poised in tems of realism, nevertheless does not directly engage the problern of representation. To modulate the narrator's dialectic further, it can be argued that the realist author cmot coerce readers into faith by demonstrating that a miracle has occurred in a novel, for, "in a reaiist, faith is not born frorn a miracle, but a miracle £tom faith" (1 62). For an Enlightenment that examines al1 phenornena objectively, any miracle that could be expenmentally venfied would transfotm into a bmte fact, one çoverned by the laws of nature even if its occurrence caused the laws of nature to be reinterpreted. Spiritualists, whom the Devi1 mocks for considering that they have found material proofs of the other world "because devils have shown them their horns" (2 346), no less physically objectiQ the divine world. Adorno exposes the absurdity of modern occult movements in which the "same rationalistic and ernpiricist apparatus that threw the spirits out is being used to reimpose them on those who no longer trust their own reason" ("Theses on the Occult" 132). At the Iimits of occultism and of an unreflective Enlightenment, the slightest trace of the divine world that enters the field of representation, one illuminated by linear perspective for the penetrating gaze of a subject. is reduced to the positivism of an objective, material fact. The divine and human realrns thus become one and the same. To represent the miracle of the incarnation directly in Zosima's or Christ's body, therefore, would not only elirninate the need for faith but annul the miracle itself As Holbein's Dead Christ demonstrates even before the emergence of modern representation. the only guarantee against a reduction of the divine to the levei of the human is to portray only the human even in a representation of the divine. Following Holbein's example, Dostoevsky does not directly represent a miracle in The Brothers Karamazov. In the Chapter "Believing Peasant Women," Zosima seems miraculously to heal a peasant woman, but the narrator insists that this healing resulted from the "nervous shock" she received when Zosima covered her with his "stole [3nirrpaxirnbm]" ( 1 87). Zosima also seems to prophesy Mitya's tragedy when he bows deeply down before hirn in his cell, but

Zosima himself later explains that at that moment he "seemed to see something temible ...as if his whole fate were expressed [sbipruun] in his eyes [B~~MB]''(1 353). Lastly. if Ivan does not explain how the people of Seville recog~zedthe divine in Christ. then neither does Zosima's body miraculously preserve a çerene beauty after his death. If God's presence is felt in The Brothers Karamazov, then He gazes at the reader as if from an icon. There are many icons in the novel. Besides the numerous icons at the rnonastery, Madame Khokhlakova gives Mitya a sïiver icon from the Kievian relics of the Holy Martyr Varvara instead of the three thousand mbles for which he had petitioned her and Fyodor hides the three thousand rubles Mitya considered his rightttl inheritance behind icons in his bedroom. Icons that have no settings are also hung in the little church where Ilyusha's fùneral service is held. The faces of the icons themselves, however, are subject to an image ban. This is nowhere more clear than in Alyosha's early memory of his rnother, Sofia Ivanovna, before her icon:

Fyodor has likely just persecuted Sofia Ivanovna as he did when he violated perhaps this very same icon in their first year of maniage. Fyodor's iconoclasrn and cruelty are relevant in an interpretation of this "picture," for his mother's shrieks and screams, the pain Alyosha feels as his mother holds hirn to her breast, and the nurse's terror and anxiety for

16 .. [Al11 he remembered was an evening, a quite sumrner evening, an open uindou-. the slanting rays of the setting sun (it \vas the slanting rays that he remembered most of dl). an icon in the corner of the room, a lighted larnp in fiont of it, and on her knees before the icon his mother. sobbing as though in hysterics, with screams and shrieks, snatching hirn up in her arrns. hugging hun to her breast so tightly that it hurt, and praying for hirn to the Virgin's protection. and suddenly a nurse runs in and snatches him from her in terror. There you have the picture!" (Trans. Magarshack 1 13). Alyosha's health are part of the suffering of the innocent upon which Ivan rejects the world God has created. In this picture the contradictions of theodicy are infiised with imases of suffering. IfFyodor has violated the icon, then Sofia Ivanovna's hysterical devotion before the icon of the Mother of God fills it once again with the light of her faith. If the baby Aiyosha has been frightened by his terrorized mother, then Alyosha remembers al1 his Iife that this picture was not only "frenzied, but beautiftl." The suffet-ing in the room is illuminated for Alyosha and for the reader by natural light. A lamp illuminates the icon on the table and the "slanting rays of the setting sun," which Atyosha remembers "most of all," shine from the window. Natural light fills a11 the depths ofthis picture inciuding the table with icon, but the face of the icon lies outside of the picture. Does God Himself view this "picture" fiom the depthless icon, does He fil1 the room with the invisible light of His presence? Through the fictions that his characters create, through their voices, through their dreams and through their nightmares, Dostoevsky traces the outlines of icons from which the invisible God rnight gaze at the sufferings of the characters and of the reader. These outlines can nevertheless only be traced in the iconoclastie cross-section of the dialectic of belief. Smerdyakov correctly informs Ivan that he will not find God if he Iooks for him. Whether there is a God who gazes from these icons lies beyond the Iimits of representation.

2.2. Aesthetic Distance and the Image of the Kenotic Christ

If Holbein's Dead Christ does not employ aesthetics to propagate dogma, then neither is his image oFChrist's corpse reducible to a non-aesthetic, scientific representation. Rejecting the identity of the beautifid and the good that Ficino and the neoplatonists perceived in the "ceremony of artistic production" (Camille 340), Holbein's aesthetics forces the physicality of death into the reaIm of the negative sublime by manipulatins the perspective of his viewers. From the lacunae Leonardo da Vinci had opened between artificial and natural perspective Holbein develops his own system of perspective that privileges neither the actual çeometrical ordering of objects in space nor their perceived order in the imagination of the viewer, but the metaphysical relation between the represented object and the subject gazing on that object. The dead Christ is lit not fiorn heaven but from below." It must ais0 be viewed from below since the line connecting the apexes of the inverted pyramids intersects the plane of the lower board of the tomb. The gaze of the eye follows the path of a natural light, thus emphasiting the presence of a gaze while strengthening the intirnacy of the viewer with the dead body. While the path of this gaze is definable within artificial perspective, the lowering of the ideal viewing position to below the body nevertheless reflects a tendency in the painting to distort perspective. Thus the emaciated corpse has been elongated in the process of being translated fiom the represented field into the painting. This elongated body lies in an extremely narrow tornb. In a much more subtle distortion of iinear perspective than the anamorphic skull in The Ambassadors, the tomb itself does not define space within perfect nght angles. The angle between the nght sideboard and the backboard is extremely obtuse on the surface of the canvas, thus suggesting that the vanishing point beyond the tomb is closer to the viewer than the one that would have been in defined following the lines on Christ's body. Either the tomb itseIf is not rectilinear or the virtual surface of the canvas is slightly convex. From either side of this gestalt, Christ's body, already extremely foregrounded. is thrust closer to the viewer. If the surface of the canvas is convex, then the distance between Christ's body and the ideal viewing position is artificially reduced. Moreover. as even the back of the tomb lies close to the surface of the painting, the vast majority of the defined space of the painting, including the vanishing point, lies behind the visible field of the viewer. By foregrounding Christ's corpse and by manipulating the perspective of the viewer, Holbein reduces the depth of the painting and thus intimates the two-dimensionality of the icon. Without a vanishing point to command, the subject lacks sufficient distance to gaze disinterestedly and thus is forced into intimacy with the dead body of Christ. Nevertheless, if Holbein's distortion of perspective undermines the complacency of the subject's empirical gaze, then it does not do so by dissolving the subject but by making

17 Paul Ganz emphasizes the humanking importance of the lighting in Holbein's Dead Christ: "The drwdful sight is relieved only by the illumination of the features. whkh cornes from belon. and the shadows over the anguished eyes" (2 18). viewers more arvare of their gaze. By dirninishing distance between the subject and the dead corpse Holbein intensifies the horror of severance. Viewing fiom below and up- close, the subject experiences both the incommensurable othemess of death and the metaphysical scanda1 of the violation of Christ's tomb. Intimacy with the dead Christ thus evokes not an ecstatic vision €rom the icon but a negative sublime. Metaphysically, the violation of the tornb cannot be undone. The reduction of aesthetic distance ernphasizes the complicity of the subjective gaze in the death of God. To paraphrase Nietzsche's famous words in The Gay Science, "God is Dead" because "we have killed km" (1 8 1). The values of the higher world fa11 under the light of human knowledge conceming the fallen world. Nevertheless, the religious meaning of the painting is not exhausted by a nihilistic denial of the divine world. On the contrary. at a time when both dualism and the balance between word and image were beùig redefined in Renaissance Europe, Holbein's Dead Christ cm be interpreted as a religious conimitment to the image of Christ's flesh. Against what he considers to be Dostoevsky's interpretation of Holbein's Dead Christ, John Rowlands argues that nineteenth-century commentators were mistaken to consider Holbein's Dead Christ to be the result of atheistic thinking. Instead, "its message is intended as one of belief' and its purpose was supposed to have been as an "aid to devotion...so that the viewer's powers of imagination would be greatly intensified in contemplating the Passion and Christ's 'bloody sweat"' (52, 53). Beyond his oversimplification of Dostoevsky's subtle, indirectly voiced position. Rowlands unintentionally validates an atheistic interpretation by rehearsing the dialectic of belief Through the dramatization of the magnitude of the miracle of Christ's resurrection. belief becomes intensified through the possibility of disbelief Nihilism lurks in such a dialectical pitting of a miracle against the physical conditions overcome by that miracle. Nineteenth-century cornmentators arguably perceived more clearly than those of earlier or later eras how Holbein's Dead Christ reflects a moment in that nihilistic movement which required nineteen centuries to realize, the death of the Christian God. Nevertheless, Rowland's emphasis on Christ's "bloody sweat" opens ont0 an interpretation of faith based not on the miracle of resurrection but on the pathos of the suffering of an al1 too human Christ. If one cari lose one's faith fiom Holbein's Dead Christ, then this is only because one could find it there. In a passage that would later become a central justification for Christian iconography, Paul writes that in Christ is reflected the "image [eikon] of the invisible God" (Colossians

1 : 15). lS If the "Word became flesh" (John 1:26) and if human flesh is molded in God's image and likeness (Genesis 1 :26, 27), then the icon reflects the invisible God through an image of the flesh of the incamated Word. Nevertheless, the relationship between the image of Christ and his flesh is a theologically tenuous one. After the rediscovery of Plato in the fifteenth century, the dudism which he had perhaps historically imparted to Christianity redefined once more for Catholic Europe the metaphysical relationships between the spintual and material reahs. Replacing even as it restructures the Pauline trichotomy of spirit, soul and body, dualism no sooner redeems the beauty of the world in its neoplatonism than it reaches its opposite limit by rendering the incommensurability of spirit and fallen matter complete. This dualism between perfect spirit and fallen matter is reflected in the paragone between word and image. While developing a Platonic distinction between the senses such as "touch, hea.ring, sight, smell, and taste" and "less physical" faculties such as "memory, intellect, and will," Erasmus in Praise of Follv arjues that in the "good man," one who strives to liberate his soul fiom the corrupt passions of the body, "is reflected the image of the supreme rnind which alone they cal1 the szrntntrmt botzurn" (203, 204).. The icon of the invisible God has been iconoclastically rendered spiritual, non-sensual, intellectual and thus textual. Even this iconic reflection of God in the human rnind is rejected by Reformation t heologies. Against humanism' s morality play of intellectual work, fait h spo ken t hrough words represents for Luther the only possible path to salvation. After the saints. Mary and iconic representation are dismissed, the only intermediary who fills the ontological void between God and humanity is Christ, who is addressed in the spoken words of prayer and who is God's Word, the Bible. Mediation through the Word replaces the veneration of

18 In his introductory discussion of the icon in God Without Beinp, Jean-Luc Marion goes so fiu as to suggest that this Pauline formula "must serve as our nom: it even mua be grneralized to every icon, as, hdeed John of Darnascus explicitly ventures: pasa eikon ekphanrorike tou knrphrolr kni deiktike [every icon manrfests and indicates the secret]" ( 1 7). the icon, the "Protestant prin~iple'~replaces "Catholic substance" (Luther in Christensen 55). The Protestant Word therefore denies not only the possibility of divine communication through the icon but undermines the icon's ontologicai relationship to the divine. On January the 27th 1522, at almost the same tirne as Holbein was working on the Dead Christ and as the first iconoclastie wave reached his adopted city, Basel, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt published the Reforrnation's first major thesis calling for the destruction of images. Car1 C. Christensen selectively quotes from this thesis in his book Art and the Reformation in Germanv: Karlstadt challenges the long-dead Gregory or any of his modem followers to Say just what it is that the iaity leam £iom images. Is not the answer that they leam "vain carnal life and suffering," and that the images lead one no further than the flesh? "For example, from the image of the cnicified Christ you leam nothing except the physical suffering of Christ (how He drooped His head, and the like). But Christ said that His own flesh is of no avail, rather that it is the spirit which is profitable and rnakes alive." Crucifixes teach merely how Christ died. not the infinitely more important tmth of why He died. Being "deaf and dumb," images signiQ nothing but the flesh-which is of no value--and therefore they are of no value. "But the word of God is spintual and it done is profitable to beiievers." (3 3) Karlstadt denounces images with the flesh. Beyond the question of whether iconoclasm is theologically justifiable, Karlstadt's devaluation of the image as iniuge is cornmon to al1 Reformation theologies. Whereas in pre-Reformation Christianity the icon functioned as an intermediary between the believer's ecstatic gaze and God's suprasensual presence, the image is meaninal for the Protestant believer only when it provokes a tme. spintual thought. The pre-representational domination of the Word, which theologically sanctions the making of icons on the condition that they narrate its stories, is thus reinforced by a post-representational domination of moral and doctrinal interpretation. Whether images are employed as propaganda for the cause of Reformation. as pedagogical tools to teach illiterate members of the congregation doctrines from the Word, or as allegories of the moral teachings ofthe Word (what a marvelous enactment of the image's self-sacrifice to the Word is depicted in Albrecht Dürer's FourApostles!). images are transformed into text in order to signiq in Protestant theology 1O-!

At the other side of the Reformation identity of Word and Spirit lies Holbein's Dead christ. L9 Having already illustrated the labyrinth of antinornian inversions of spirit and flesh found in Erasmus' Praise of Follv, inversions that becarne possible precisely because of the radicaiization of the disembodied spirit on the eve of the Reformation, Holbein paints an image of the kenotic Chnst. Purging Christ of his divine nature in the Dead Chnst, Holbein heeds the wisdom ofFolly7swords: "Chnst too, though he is the wisdom of the Father, was made something of a fool himself in order to help the folly of mankind. when he assumed the nature of man and was seen in man's fonn; just as he was made sin so that he could redeem sinners" (Erasmus 198, 199). hstead of exalting the beauty of Christ's spirit through which he has Life, Holbein portrays the humility of his dead flesh. The body of Christ which had hung erect Born the cross has been laid along the floor of a long, narrow tomb. The tomb itself is wooden and unadorned. Only the cloth around Christ's midsection covers his naked body.20 Where then does Christ's spin? disappear to if it is not in the tomb? 1s Christ harrowing helI? 1s he Sitting at the right hand of God? Beyond the ultimate optimism of al1 Christian dualisms, Holbein's Christ "emptied

19 Holbein's relationship to the Reformation is not just difficult to determine since hc wrott: veq. IittIe about himself. but also apparently highi>.compIes and inconsistent. Without delvlitg herc into al1 of his relations between his patrons Erasmus and Sir Thornas More or the implications of his move from Reformation Base1 to Henry the VIiI's still Catholic court in England, it 1s nevertheless cIear that Holbein's religious paintings are less coloured by Protestant propaganda than those of the late Dürer and Lucas Cranach the Elder. In his lecture "Hoibein and the Refonnation.*' F. Sas1 notes that Holbein "declared himselfa member of the refonned cornunit)- in 1530" (285) and that he ilIustrated the title page for Luther's Bible, but that he also made a crude. anti-Luther woodcut entitled Hercules Germanicus in 1523. As Hercules, the reformer beats the pope ~ltha club and haalready vanguished Aristotle. St. Thomas and many other Catholic saints and scholars. Sas1 wites that Holbein "seeins to have captured something ofthe Reformer's ntrocztas." but that the woodcut was denounced hostilely by the Lutheran UIrich (282. 283). More significant than an interpretation of the polemical intentions behind the ~.oodcut.however. is Sad's emphasis on ho\\ foreign its iconography is to Holbein's art. Action is often reduced to a niinirnurn in his portraits and in rnmy of his religious works. In contrast to images of violent actions that represent the self- evident tmths of the propagandistic word, HoIbein's portraits of Erasmus portmy the duration of ri quiet contemplation. Saxi considers that Holbein's portraits of Erasmus "minor. perhaps better than anything else. his religious attitude" (283). "In Holbein's Dead Christ. Christ remains covered by the small cloth wliicli he ofien wears on the cross in Renaissance paintings. In contrast. al1 four gospel accounts of the burial mention that Joseph of Anmathea wapped Christ-s body in linen cloth before taying him in the tomb. In John-s account. the body is also cvrapped kvith spices (Matthew 2759. Mark 15:46. Luke 23 53. John L9:4O). Himself' of his divinity and "humbled himself and became obedient to death - even death on a cross" (Philippians 2:7,8). The doctrine of kenosis (emptying) is Paul's most radical interpretation of the ontological relationship between the divine and the human. A Christ "emptied" of spirit extends the mystery of a God dying on a cross to a God who suffers and is humiliated throughout life. The example of Christ that Paul considers himself to have follorved when he suffers imprisonments, shipwrecks, beatings, hunger, thirst and cold (II Corinthians 11:24,27) susgests that the iconic Iikeness between the hurniliated Chnst and his servants is in their common flesh, not in the spirit. Although in Paul's letters askesis and kenosis complement one another, the emphasis on suffering in the doctrine of kenosis reduces moral judgment. The single aescetic command in the doctrine of kenosis to imitate the hardships of Chnst by becorning "obedient" easily passes over into a passive endurance of life's inevitable suffenngs, even suffenng not related specifically to the cause of Christianity. Thus Peter goes hrther tlian Paul when he writes that "since Christ has suffered in the flesh, amyourselves with the same purpose, because he who has suffered in the flesh is done with sin" (1 Peter 4: I).~' If the suffenng body is beyond judgment for the sins of the £iesh, then suffenng occurs before the judgments of morality. Here aeskesis and kenosis part ways. Where the aescetic suffers because he denies himself the pleasures of the flesh, the kenotic worshipper suffers the pains of the flesh by living in the world. The tragedy of the aescetic's stoic and heroic rejection of the world is matched by the kenotic sufferer's tragic vision of the world. As Kristeva suggests, Holbein's Dead Christ envisions a new rnorality of endurance (1 13). Put dinerently, the pathos of kenosis reflects the arnorality of suffering. The agony that Christ endured on the cross is everywhere evident in Holbein's Dead Christ. The spasm in his right hand, the bruises on his face, his gaping mouth, his expanded chest, and his rolled-back eyes are irnprints not just of the paroxysm of pain Christ suffered at the moment of death but traces of the guards' blows and of the continuous, gradually increasing suffocation he undenvent on the cross. The kenosis of Christ's divinity does not occur at the moment of his death but is a condition of his human flesh. Christ's

" 1 m indebted to Dan Mellarnphy for drawuig my attention to ths remarkable passage. emaciated body is not just a symbol of his thirst on the cross but his body's physical response to a life filled with hunger. No less kenotic is Holbein's earlier, living Man of Sorrows, who is depicted in a rare, intirnate moment derthe judgment of the Sanhedrin. Listlessly sitting down with his face strained in an expression of utter sorrow, his raw eyes staring into empty space, Holbein's man of sorrows represents a ventable physiology of grief No longer petitioning God to "remove this cup from me" (Luke 2242) as he was at Gethsemane, nor yet crying "Eli, eli, lama sabachthani?" (Matthew 27:46) as he will on the cross, Holbein's man of sorrows suffers alone in a barren courtyard. Between the corntoit of prayer to God and the desperation of beseeching a distant Father, the man of sorrow's silent loneliness is a profoundly human response to the loneliness he faces in the tomb in Holbein's Dead Christ. In contrast to the celebration of the divinity of the human ideal in Italian art, Holbein represents the agony that the human Christ suffered. In contrast to Erasmus' speculation that it is in the good man's higher, less physical faculties that the "image of the supreme mind" is reflected, Holbein locates the intersection of the image of Christ and the image of man in their common flesh. In contrast to Karlstadt's iconoclastic thesis that "fiorn the image of the crucified Christ you leam nothing except the physical suffering of Christ." Holbein's Dead Christ employs al1 of the image's power to signi@ beyond words to gaze into the meaning of Christ's physical suffering. Holbein's rnelancholy humanism seeks meaning in suffenng and death without forcing this meaning beyond suffering or death. The kenotic Christ lives fûlly within this circle of sorrow. From where did Holbein learn about kenosis? Certainly there are paraphrases of the Biblical passages on kenosis in Erasmus' Praise of Folly, but Kristeva's suggestion that the "originality" of Holbein's vision "is affiliated with the Christian iconographic tradition that came out of Byzantiiim" reveals a stronger influence through images. Learninç fiom the -'many depictions of the dead Christ [which] were spread through central Europe, around 1500" (1 15). Holbein directed Renaissance humanism towards the hurnan flesh of Christ. In The Idiot, Prince Myshkin feverishly proclaims that Roman Catholicism "preaches a distorted Christ ...the Antichrist" to which "our Christ, whom we preserved and they never knew" must "shine in opposition" (6 543, 545). It is f?om this dialectical opposition between Catholic htichrist and Russian Christ that Ivan's "The Grand Inquisitor" will later emerge. Although Holbein's Dead Christ has become entombed as a relic of Europe's dead past in the Kunstmuseum at Basel. Europe's first public art gallery. his painting nevertheless does not portray the "distorted Christ" of Roman Catholicism. On the contrary, Holbein's Dead Christ ominously resembles Dostoevsky's precious, living, Russian Christ. Russian Orthodoxy, having also adopted kenosis fi-om Byzantium, made kenosis central in its hagiography.= If the path from Byzantium to Holbein leads through the image, then Dostoevsky was thoroughly familiar with Russian Orthodox hagiography and considered his main artistic project to be the unfinished The Life of a Great Simer, of which The Brothers Karamazov was to have been oniy the first part. From Russia's first saints Boris and Gleb, canonized for having been massacred by their brother Vladimir in a struggle for control of ancient Kiev (Fedotov 99, to the recent debate in the Holy Synod about whether to canonize Tsar Nicholas the Second for having suffered a similar fate at the hands of the BoIsheviks, intense physical suffering has transfigured even the most ordinary of sinners into saints in Russian hagiography. As the fate of Bons and Gleb indicates, kenotic suffering does not necessarily result from the conscious pursuit of Christian truth, nor is it necessanly even actively sought. In Dostoevsky's novels, this moral ambivalence at the heart of Russian kenosis ofien blurs the distinction between the passion of the martyr and the passion of the prodigal son. Both the young Zosirna and Mitya lead melancholy lives even at the heights of their worldly debauchery in The Brothers Karamazov, lives that attain religious depth both through a breadth of sensual experience and through the melancholic emptiness of sensualism. Beyond the psycholog of moral intention, hurnanity already suffers the world and thus becomes purified for redemption. In contrast to the aescetic path of Father Ferapont. Zosima sends Alyosha fiom the rnonastery into the world where he will "see great sorrow [rope] and in this sorrow will become happy .... Seek happiness in sorrow" (1 121). The lack of moral imperative beyond the cal1 to a life full of suffering is reflected in the lack of a direct object

-George71 P. Fedotov's monumental study The Russian Reli-~ousMind ernphasizes the importance and originality of kenosis in Russian thought. In particular. he descnbes ho\\-the vatues of Russia's pagan Earth-Mother cults facilitated the reception of Byzantine kenosis and augrnented kenosis ' theological role in Russian Orthodos hagiography to cause suffering. Cornmenting on Dostoevsky's "vision according to which man's humanity lies less in the quest for pleasure of profit ...than in a longing for voluptuous suffering," Kristeva notes that "such suffering differs frorn animosity or rage, it is less objectai, more withdrawn into its own person ..." (179). Having been sent into the world to seek suffering by Zosima, Alyosha is engulfed in a sorrow that is too fluid to be reduced to the pain of the loss of Zosima or to the despondence of a crisis of belief before Zosirna's decaying flesh. Nevertheiess, the doctrine of kenosis belongs to an antinomian consciousness. whether Paul's, Erasmus' or Dostoevsky's. The weakness, folly and obedience explored in Pauline kenosis is always balanced by the strength, wisdom and lordship that God exalts in Christ. to whose name "every knee should bow, those who are in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth" (Philippians 2: 10). The transfiguration of the kenotic Christ into the derof the earth suggests that the antinomies are resolved across an apocalyptic t hreshold, whether Christ is enthroned at the resurrection, the transfiguration, the ascension or the second coming. As Kristeva notes in her anaiysis of Dostoevsky's anxiety before Holbein's Dead

-7 -7 Christ "a sense of time abolished weighs on that picture, the inescapable prospect of death erasing al1 cornmitment to a project, continuity, or resurrection" ( 188). Redemption and regeneration through suffenng in The Brothers Karamazov are intimately related to the resurrection of the flesh. Nevertheless, whereas the resurrection of the flesh occurs at the first moment of the apokatastatic universal harmony, when " there shall be time no longer." redemption and regeneration require temporal evo1ution.l' It is only under the promise of resurrection that the events of The Brothers Karamazov move towards a climax that is endlessIy deferred. At the end of the novel, Mitya is still undecided about whether to choose resurrection in Siberia or flight to Amenca and it is not clear whether Ivan will survive his mental collapse. As both Ivan's mental collapse and Mitya's decision indicate, however, the path to resurrection leads through suffering. V. V. Rozanov's insight that the "main and ail-

23 In a letter to the philosopher Fyodorov's associate Peterson in March of 1878. Dostoevsky imites that "we here, that is Solovyov and 1, at least, believe in a rd. literal and persona1 resurrection and that it will occur on the earth?' (15 535). conditioning ce 06ycnosnkisaio~~~]thing for ~ostoevsLy]was human suffering and its comection with the general meaning of life" (49) expresses the philosophical problem at the heart of Dostoevsky's tragic aesthetic. If an apocalyptic beyond-time is temporaily incompatible with the duration of the novel as a genre, then a literal transfiguration of the flesh lies no less beyond the limits of realism. Fedotov writes that in Russian kenosis "the distance between the two worlds is not the gulf between flesh and spirit - as in Platonic mysticism - but between the fallen and the transfigured and deified flesh" (129). Suffering and death are the lot of the kenotic Christ's flesh, but whereas Holbein's art is more an aesthetic of death, Dostoevsky's novels present an aesthetic of suffering. As Bakhtin writes, "in Dostoevsky's world death finalizes nothing, because death does not affect the most important thing in this world - consciousness for its own sake" (Problems 290). Thus the first consequence of the translation of Holbein's Dead Christ into The Idiot is the placement of characters around Christ's corpse. While gazing at Holbein's Dead Christ. Ippolit, Myshkin and Rogozhin al1 suffer the question of belief in God. Consciousness is itself a form of suffering, and the doubts of a consciousness yearning for understanding are arrested before the image of suffering. In The Brothers Karamazov, the literal transfiguration of the flesh is transforrned into an aesthetics of suffering and a temporal resolution of the antinomy between a fallen and a transfigured flesh is replaced by the stillness of the dialectical image. The possibility that suffering can be beautiful thus represents not only a messianic hope but an aesthetic project. In Dostoevsky's novels, beauty is entangled in two, interrelated antinomies. In the first antinomy, beauty represents an ideal, one embodied in the words of Shakespeare and in Raphael's Sistine Madonna and which Dostoevshy had hoped to incarnate in such characters as Prince Myshkin and the Elder Zosima. This ideal beauty, no less than the melancholy arising from its sense of distance, leads humanity from banality, sensuality and cannibalisrn to God, imrnortality, paradise and resurrection. It is in this marner that "beauty will Save the world" (The Idiot 6 3 84), for beauty is both the goal and the prime mover of regeneration. Nevertheless, beauty can also sanction a reality whose ideal has already been achieved, a stagnant world where the Crystal Palace has already been built." a world rnired in the very banality, sensudism and cannibalism from which the ideal beauty offers the promise of something higher. Mitya succinctly surnmarizes this first antinomy:

nepe~ecrkisr npmo~He MO^, YTO MHOE,B~ICLLI~I~~ Aaxe ceprrueM qenosek- M c YMOM BbICOKMM, HaYMHaeT C MneûJia MWOHHbI, a KOHYam MAeiFnOM COAOMCKMM. Erne crpamriee, rcro yxe c mearroM ConoMcKMM B Ayme He OTpkiuaeT M meana M~AOHH~I,M ropm OT Hero cepnue ero BOMCTHH~,KaK u B mmIe Oecnopo~~b~e rOAbi. (1 1~6)~~ The second antinomy is far more important for an understanding of Dostoevsky's aesthetic, but for that very reason more scandalous, more mysterious and less explicitly developed in his novels. If beauty is the ideal of the Madonna towards whicii a suffering humanity strives, a humanity whose suffenng itself anses from the melancholic awareness of its severance from that distant ideal, then beauty itselfis no Iess born of suffering. The kenotic Christ, a fool and a martyr whose grotesque, physical scars are visually repulsive, neither remains ugly until the transfiguration nor is he only beautfil because of his tragic martyrdom. On the contrary. he potentially preserves a trace of beauty in his suffering flesh even beyond the question of moral comrnitment. The aesthetic task of rendering suRering beautifbl, a task the Italian masters attempted even in their representations of the dead Christ, is what Ippolit considers Holbein to have entirely avoided in the Dead Christ but which Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov himself undertook in no less implausible, objective and uncornpromising a manner than did Holbein. Without redemptive beauty, the dead flesh of the kenotic Christ lacks transfiguration. Nevertheless, the romantic idealism of "the sublime and the beautifid"" must not lie

'' in his '-Winter Notes on Surnmer Impressions~'Dostoevsb descnbes the wild debaucheries of the night Iife in London's poorer quarters and the bourgeois Crystal Palace at the London Eshibition and poses the question 3s ths not. in fact, an ided already achieved?... 1s the cnd not here?" (4 4 16). "It makes me mad to think that a man of great heart and high intelligence should begin nith the ideal of Madoma and end nith the ideal of Sodom. What is more terrible is that a man witli the ideal of Sodom already in his sou1 does not renounce the ideal of Madoma, and it sets his heart abtaze, and it is tmly ablaze, as in the days of his youth and innocence" (Trans. Magarshack 1 123, 124). '6 '6 As Jackson suggests. this ostensibly Kantian formula, usually uttered with irony. functions in Dostoevsky's novels as a "kind of defining slogan of the 1840s.... There is no evidence...that Dostoevslq cleariy (if at dl) distinguished behveen the categories of the beautifül and the sublime" (190). Ill against the evidence of nature by colouring over the lacerations of Christ's kenotic flesh. Dostoevsky's redism stands in opposition to Romanticism no less than Holbein's Dead Christ to the neoplatonist cult of beauty. Here beauty's relationship with reaiism and idealism has become inverted. In the first antinomy, the beauty of Sodom was one of a present, stagnant reality and the beauty of the Madonna a hture, distant ideal. In the second antinomy, beauty does not just represent an ideal to which humanity strives but must already be visible within those who suffer in reality. If human suffering is more fundamental in Dostoevsky's aesthetic than the antinomies of morality and perhaps even the question of the existence of God, then a beauty that hopes to illuminate the portraits of his suffering characters must surrender al1 Platonic relations to goodness and to tmth even to the point of dialectically dissolving its static hostility to ugliness. The banal. debauched beauty of a stagnant reality in the first antinomy parallels the beauty of a lacerated Aesh in the second one. The aesthetic relationship between beauty and suffering thus penetrates the mystery of the kenotic opposition between Christ's desacraIized and transfigured flesh. Suffering and beauty interrelate even in the first antinomy. Having been asked to describe the faces of the three Epanchin sisters, Prince Myshkin compares Aleksandra Ivanovna's face, in which there is "a kind of secret sadness [rpycrb]'' (6 79), to Holbein's Madonna in Dresden. Aglaya's face is considered most beautifil of dl, but Myshkin undiplomatically announces that he prefers Nastas'ya Filippovna's beauty to Aglaya's having only seen a photograph of the former:

'' Thee~qraordinary beauty of the face, dong with something else about it stmck him evsn more forcibly now. It seemed to contain a boundless pride and scorn, almost hatred, and ?et at the sarne tirne something tnisting, something astonishin@y ingenuous; the contrast prompted a feeling approaching compassion in him as he gazed at those features. That dazzhg beau- verged on the intoierable, the beauty of the pale face, the alrnost hollow cheeks, the burning eyes: a strange beau& indeed!" (Trans. Myers 85). The contrast between pride, scom and hatred on the one hand and ingenuousness and tmst on the other mirrors the mord antinomy between good and evil that Mitya perceives at the heart of beauty. Adelaida suggests that Nastasya Filippovna's beauty is a "power [cma]" and that "such beauty cmtum the world inside out" (6 84). In terms of the coercive potential of representation, the image of Nastasya Filippovnafsbeauty has the power to vanquish men, but Myshkin's airnost gothic emphasis on Nastasya Filippovna's "pale face" and "hollow cheekst' demonstrate that her beauty also expresses fragility and humility. The antinornical play between a coercive, even crude physicai beauty and an imer beauty of the sou! also animates Mitya's discussion of Grushenka's beauty to Alyosha on the eve of the triai: "Before only her infernal curves [~~@epnanb~biemm6br] tormented me, but now 1 have accepted al1 her soul in mine and through her I have become myself a man!" (2 299). Between power and humility, infernal curves and the soul, the laws of nature and fieedom, sensualism and the path of regeneration, and, finally, good and evil, feminine beauty incarnates most of the major antinomies of Dostoevsky's novels. Thus the battle between "God and the devil" (1 156) that Mitya elucidates within beauty reflects the dialectic of belief and both Mitya and the sexually impotent Myshkin Lean towards the side of belief in their appraisal of feminine beauty. Nevertheless, the antinomies of beauty lie far deeper than a spiritualization of the female body. In response to Madame Epanchin's direct question about "what kind of beauty" the Prince values in Nastasya Filippovna, the Prince mumbles, "as if involuntarily. as if talking to hirnself," that "'in this face.. .there is much suffering [crpana~mMHO~O]'' (6 83). The sadness in the faces of Aleksandra and Holbein's Dresden Madonna also lends beauty to their portraits, but Myshkin's hesitant statement concerning Nastasya Filippovna intimates that suffering is not simply one aspect of beauty but a possible source for beauty. Suffenng is the "something else" that stmck Myshkin upon çazing at her photograph. The beauty of Nastasya Filippovna in The Idiot and of Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov deepens through the suffering each woman experiences after having been seduced and abandoned by older lovers. The scanda1 of Myshkin's involuntary mumble lies not in an omission to judge Nastasya Filippovna as a "fallen woman," nor even in a condescending forgiveness for her fall, but in his aesthetic judgment on the beauty of her suffering. Mitya ends his own lyncal monologue on beauty with the words "what one suffers, that's what

one talks about [~TOy KOro ~OJ-IKT,TOT O TOM il ro~opm]"(1 156). Dostoevsky's characters and narrators are hesitant to explore the relations between beauty and suffering even in the then comparatively safe, Nneteenth-century discourse on ferninine beauty. Dostoevsky himself tends to be even more consenrative in his extra-literary statements on beauty, stating in his artide on the Academy Exhibition that "there is nothing more beautifûl than a beautiful body" (380). Thus Jackson notes that Mitya "uses the word beazrty in a way that Dostoevsky never uses it outside his belles lettres, that is, to define aesthetic experience in general, apart fiom moral context; and second, that he Ends the phenornenon of beauty, in aii its contradictory content, deeply disturbing, precisely in a moral sense" (63). An examination of Dostoevsky's aesthetics should not halt before his own and his characters' monological statements on beauty but should push the antinomies within these statements to their limits in order to elucidate the depths of that aesthetic. Nevertheless, it is no less important to understand the reasons for Dostoevsky's and his characters' restraint. To deliberate on the aesthetic and moral worth of another person's suffering is one of the greatest sins in The Brothers Karamazov. Lise Khokhlakova questions whether there's a certain "scorn [npe3pe~~e]"for Snegirev when she and

Alyosha "take to pieces [pa36~pae~]his soul, from above..." (1 277). To represent ano ther's suffering abstractly, as a lover of and hence "representative" of humanity, leads to the power play within Christian pity that Nietzsche relentlessly exposes and which the Grand Inquisitor exploits in his utopia by accepting responsibility for the sins of subjects he des: "we shall allow them to sin as well, for they are weak and powerless, and they will love us, as children, for the fact that we allow them to &..and the punishment for these sins, as is fitting, we shall take upon ourselves" (1 325). As author and subject, Dostoevsky himself partakes of violence of representation when he draws portraits of suffering characters. That these characters are fictional reduces the horror of the violence but does not resolve the moral problematics of aesthetic judgment. Moreover, a sharp division between reality and literature is itself avoided in The Brothers Kararnazov. The portraits of suffering children upon which Ivan justifies the retum of his ticket to God are ones Dostoevsky himself had collected fiom newspapers and history chronicles (Rozanov 92, 94). To have judged why these portraits are beautiful within the novel would not just have represented an additional violence but would have risked sunderïng the harmony of dialectical imagery with a one-sided, aesthetic judgment. That additional violence is criticisrn's burden. In Dostoevsky's novels, the problem of aesthetic judgment is related to the problem of representation. lfbeauty can be gained through suffering, then this suffering is rvely beautiful for the one who experiences it. As Mr. Compson cynically suggests in Faulkner's The Sound and the Furv, "tragedy is ody second-hand" (1 16). To find beauty in suffering requires an act of aesthetic perception. Mysldcin comments on Nastasya Filippovnafs beauty from a photograph, and his judgments conceming Açlaya's and Aleksandra's beauty are his response to their request that he should draw their portraits. Even in the Underground Man's speculation that "in a toothache there is enjoyrnent" (4 46 1) and in Fyodor Karamazov's confession that "al1 my Me 1 have taken pleasure at being offended" (1 84) the pleasure derived fiom suffenng is both aesthetic and intersubjective. The man with a toothache groans, even after his pain has subsided, to torment his family and Fyodor considers that it is "beautifül" to be offended by others. Suffering can be beautiful to the sufferer only fiom a distance to it opened in the negative movement of consciousness. To perceive beauty in the suffenngs of another sirnilarly requires aesthetic distaxe. Nevertheless, whether through the tormented Underground Man's cycle of malice and abject humiliation or through Fyodor Karamazov's self-adopted role as fool, their contarninating beauty itself dirninishes the distance between self-sufficient. self- preserving autonomous subjects. At its opposite limits in compassion [cocrpana~~e]and shame, this dirninishing of aesthetic distance between subjects dissolves aesthetic judgment. The Underground Man's and Fyodor Karamazov's attenipts to transcend the finalizing judgrnents of others by accornplishing ever more unbearably depraved actions and their contradictory desire to attract and repulse those around them reduces the aesthetic distance between them and others to a raw, painfûlly familiar irnrnediacy. The shame they suppress in their self-representations, but which nevertheless torments and motivates them, overwhelms the psycholoçical autonorny of the spectator. The spectator begins to feel shame as well. This experience of shame is beautifùl precisely because it is shared in a pathological discordia co~zcors. A similar irnmediacy beyond the distancing of aesthetic judgment is attained through compassion. Just before his epileptic fit and Rogozhin's attempt on his Me, Myshkin contemplates that "compassion will give meaning to and teach even Rogozhin. Compassion is the rnost important and maybe the oniy law of human existence" (4 232). Compassion for someone else overflows the boundaries of one's lonely and isolated existence, the condition of "isolation [O~OCO~JI~HH~]"which Dostoevsky considered endemic to modem, Western civilization, and leads to an intersubjective harmony, a "with- ~ufferinj."~~The ontological instability of selfthat is reached at the lirnit of sharne, a limit which in Ivan's case leads to the appearance of the double, is mirrored by the ontological loss of self in the harmony of compassion. The beauty of this harmony lies not in a sublime experience that overwhelms aesthetic judgment from only one subject's perspective, but precisely in the intersubjective harmony between those who suffer together beyond the negation of judgment. The object of a subIime experience is replaced by a subject who shares in the beauty of compassion. Myshkin's near inability to articulate the beauty he perceives in Nastasya Filippovna's photograph reflects the pain of losing the harmony of compassion through the one-sidedness of an aesthetic judgment. This harmony is compassion's messianic moment. Through his "gentle smile of infinite compassion," through his kiss on the Grand Inquisitor's bloodless lips, Ivan's Christ forgives and understands al1 suffering since he hirnself "gave his innocent blood for everyone and everything" (The Brothers Karamazov 1 3 10). Compassion redeems suffering and makes possible universal harmony. Al1 judgment on heaven and earth will be voided at the first moment of etemity when "there shall be time no longer and when every voice in creation fieely sings the apokatastatic "Hosannah" before Him. Ln this manner "beauty will Save the world," for the beauty bom of suffering will transfiyre the faces of suffering. The infinite beauty of humanity's chorus will be the culmination of al1 the suffenng in the world.

" The Russian word .~ostradanie?'can be litenlly translated as 'tvith-suffering." Nevertheless, as the lifelessness of the photograph on which Myshkin gazes suggests. the harmony of compassion is beautfil but the compassionate speaator can only expenence another's suffering secondhand. If compassion is not reciprocal between two people who suffer, then the beauty one person perceives in another's suffering may even be interpreted by the second one as unbearable condescension. Nastasya Filippovna is tormented more by Myshkin's compassion than by the threat of Rogozhin's knife. At its limit, compassion leads not to the Grand Inquisitor's simultaneous pity and scom for a weak and vicious humanity but to a sense, however fiagile and fleeting, of Love and understanding for another being, but suffering, especially physical pain, can only be perceived as beautiful fiom an aesthetic distance. Compassion must remain distinct f?om suffering or sin against suffenng. It is the sense of inevitable distance and disharmony between one who suffers and one who feels compassion that leads to the rnost intense melancholy, a feeling of separation and helplessness during the most intimate moments of shared expenence. If Holbein's manipulation of perspective in the Dead Chnst intensifies the horror of severance by reducing aesthetic distance, then the unifying movement of compassion shatters intersubjective distance only to rnake the compassionate viewer that much more aware of the indissoluble othemess of suffering. The generality of compassion, one which leads to the possibility of a universal harmony, erases the uniqueness of each person's individual experience of pain. As Ivan speculates. "let's Say. for example, that 1am capable of profound sutferuig, but another person never still could not understand to what degree 1 suffer because he is not me" (1 300). The "dialectical imageM2'reduces the aesthetic distance of representation and thus rnakes possible the psychological imrnediacy of compassion. It is precisely through the

29 The tenn "dialecticai image" derives fiom Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and the interpretation of dialecticat imagery in the The Brothers Kararnazov that follows has in man- n-ays been inspired by Benjamin's "Theses on the Pldosophy of Estoq.'? Nevertheless. the folioning interpretation does not represent a direct application of Benjamin-s notion of the dialecticaI image to Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky himself was clearly esploring the relations behveen dialectic and image. The Grand Inquisitor, for esample, writes that the three questions the Devil posed to Christ in the wildemess -'as it were are combined and foretold at once the a-hole further development of hurnan history and three images appeared on the earth in which al1 the irresolvable contraditions of human nature met together" (1 3 17). Although there are many similantes behveen the dialectical images in The Brothers Kararnazov and Benjamin's scattered "contrasts" in Nastasya Filippovna's portrait that a feeling of compassion arises in Myshkin. Inverting Mitya's belief that it is in beauty that "the shores meet and al1 contradictions live together" (1 156), images in The Brothers Karamazov are beautifid when al1 contradictions are illuminated within them. The reduction of aesthetic distance Holbein accomplishes through perspectival distortions in the Dead Christ is not possible in the medium of the novel. In the novel, pictures drawn through words not only lack direct, visual irnmediacy but must be mediated by a voice. The cold objectivity of a neutral narrator and the "sentimentalism [cemn~e~~anbn~ra~bel"j~of a subjective one equally distance their listeners fiom the portraits they draw. The voices of the narrator and characters, however, are irnrnediately heard by those listening within the novel. For those reading wittiin or outside the novel, the translation of visual graphemes into sounds represents yet another moment of aesthetic distancing. Nevertheless, the sensualism of the voice is far more irnrnediate than the pictures of literary portraiture or landscape. Dialogue dominates Dostoevslq's novels. Through his notion of dialogism, Bakhtin demonstrates how the representational hierarchy of the rnonological narrator's word over finalized characters is reduced when the narrator, character and reader dialogically interact within the sarne semantic plane. This polyphony renders it aesthetically possible for characters to be "not only objects of authorial discourse but also subjects of their own directly signiwing discourse" (Problem 7). This "not only" is crucial, liowever. for the statements about the "dialectical image" in his unfinished Arcades Project, there are also significant dzerences, not least of which is the German philosopher's development of the dialectical image in a historical materialism and the Russian novelist-s aesthetic concern nith the representation of suffering. The following interpretation of the dialectical image brings together ideas on beauty expressed by Mitya and Myshkin, Ivan Karamazov's description of the apokatastatic universa1 harmony and his dialectical interpretation of "pictures" of su ffering children, and Dostoevsky's lifelong concem with messianism and apocal>ptic tirne. Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of Hïstory" illuniinated many paths through which these disparate tekqs and ideas might brought into relation with one another. 'O 'O In The Brothers Karamazov, the pejorative word '.sentimental'nichan'el'is Frequently employed instead of the more neutral and standard "sentimental'nost'." For esample. Kolya Krasotkin considers Alyosha's involvement with children to be sentimentalism. in more aesthetic terms, sentimental narration draws attention away fiom the suffe~gof the character tu the subjectivity of the author. As a lyical expression of the author's own subjectivie, sentimental narration leaves itself open to parody. In Dostoevslq's novels, sentimentalism is related to the ''men of the forties" and to the "abstract lovers of hurnanity" and its main artistic proponent is the fiequently satirized novelist Turgenev. dialogism that Bakhtin develops in Problems of Dostoevskv's Poetics complements, not replaces, a dialectics of the object. The representational distance of portraiture is aesthetically reduced when a character begins to speak, but the inviolability of the limits of consciousness ensures that a veil of representation remains between consciousnesses. This dialogical interplay of representation rnirrors the aesthetic of suffering, for the movement of compassion at its limit harmonizes the relations between two subjects who expenence each other's pain. As Bakhtin writes, "at the Ievel of his religious-utopian worldview

Dostoevsky carries dialogue into etemity, conceiving of it as eternal, CO-rejoicing,CO- admiration, con-cord" (252). This harmony of compassion may even be expressed in the iconic gaze into another personts eyes, but only through the negation of consciousness can suffering be shared in this reciprocal gaze. Having suffered a five-week, psychosomatic illness derMitya's arrest, Grushenka not only becomes more beautiful to Alyosha but "he loved.. .to meet her gaze.. ..There seemed to be in her gaze [Bee ~srnirne]somethïng fim and comprehending" (2 265). Nevertheless, it is precisely when one subject refuses or cannot render suffering aesthetic through the negation of self-consciousness that it retains its foreign, objective, and alienating impenetrability. If' the old woman in Grushenka's fable kicks away the other sinners as she nses out of the fiery lake, then Ivan negates the possibility of universal harmony precisely because the suffering of children cannot be reçenerated or redeemed. If characters reduce the aesthetic distance of their own portraits by speakinç. then Ivan reduces the aesthetic distance between the "pictures [K~~TWH~,I]''~~of sufenng children he draws and his listeners through the irnrnediacy of his dialectical word. In one of his pictures, Ivan describes how a five-year-old girl is tomired by her parents. He describes that her parents had ofien "beat, birched and kicked her," but that they then "finally reached the height of precision [yroqe~~ocrb]:"

@3]xonon, B ~0po33an~pa.n~ ee Ha BCEO Horb B omoxee Mecro, H 3a TO, wo oHa He npocmacb HO ~ibm...3a ~TOO~M~~HB~M eM sce mua ee KUOM M sacra~nm~ee eCTb 3TOT Kan, LI 3T0 MaTb, MaTb ~~cT~BsIs[~~!3Ta MâTb MOTJIa CilaTb, KOrna HOWO cnb~~lan~icbCTOH~I 6ennoro peoen~a,sanep~oro B nonnoM ~ecre! no~il~aeubnu TM 370, KOL-A~ManeHbKoe CyuecrBo, eue He y;Memuree naxe OCMbICnkiTb, qTO C H& HeJïaeTCII, 6be~ce6~ B lïOAJIOM MeCTe, B TeMHOTe M B

3 1 Ivan uses the word "p icture [~aprw~a]" fiequently in his namtives of chikiren's suffering. XOnODe, KPOiiieqHbIM CBOMM KyJIaSKOM B H~OpBaHHJWVyAKy Li iiJIareT CBOMMki KPOBaBbIMM, H~~IIO~HB~IMW,ECPOTIUIMM CJIe3KaMH K 'I~ox~N~K~'',YT06b1 TOT 3aumm ero, - noHuMaernb nH TH 3-ry axmem, npyr ~ofiH 6pa.r MOG... am qero 3~aaxmerr TaK -a M CO~A~H~!Ee3 Hee, roBopm, M np06bï~b6b1 He Mor renoaeK Ha se~ne,~60 He nossm6b1 ~o6paw 3na. ,&IR rero no3~a~a~bî~o WpTOBO no6po Li 3n0, KOrAa 3TO CTOJIbKOïO CTOHT? na BeDb BeCb MIrp iiO3HaHH.A He crom Torna 3~mcnao~ peoenor~a K "60~e~b~e".( 1 3 OS, 306)'~

The Underground Man writes that "saering is doubt, negation .... Suffering is the only principle of consciousness" (4 477). Ivan Karamazov's suffering of the dialectic of belief mirrors the suffering of the children in his verbal pictures. It is this sufferingthat redeems some small part of his diaiectical violence. The only way to redeem the scanda1 of exploiting the tears of a five-year-old girl in a repudiation of human knowledge. God's created world and the universal harmony at the end of time is to illuminate the contradictions of al1 heaven and earth through those very tears. Ivan's dialectic does not objectifi the girl's suffering from the distance of a disinterested spectator, nor does the rigour of the dialectic permit Ivan to sing a sentimental lament over her tears. Furthemore, Ivan does not omit this five-year-old girl's tearfùl prayer to her "God [~oxc~H~K~]""but stills his dialectic precisely at that image. Through the only words she speaks, this five-year-old girl not only reverses the direction of Ivan's rebellion but emerges as a self-signifyinç consciousness. The mystery of the universal harmony at the end of time lies beyond the comprehension of a Euclidean rnind and of a world whose very existence depends on the opposition between good and evil, but humans nevertheless have the right, as free beings, to dialecticize that future harmony by opposing it with the

3-'-"[TJhey . shut her up al1 night? in the cold and fiost- in the privy and because she di&-t ask to get up at night ...they smeared her face \.cith escrement and made her eat it. and it \vas her mother. her mother who made her! ,And that mother could sleep at night, hearing the groans of the poor child locked up in that vile place! Do you realize what it means when a little girl like that. who-s quite unable to understand what is happening to her, beats her little achïng chest in that vile place, in the dark and coId, with her tiny fists and weeps searing, unresentfiil and gentle tears to 'dear. kind God' to protect her? Cmyou understand al1 this absurd and horrible business. rn?. friend and brother. ..why this absurd and horrible business is so necessary and has been brought to passa? They tel1 me that without it man could not even have esisted on earth, for lie would not have Irnown good and evil. But why must we know that confounded good and evil when it costs so niuch'? Why? the whole tvorld of knotvledge isn't worth that child's tears to her -dear and lund Goda?-" (Trans . Magars hack 2 8 3) 33 Her word "bozhen'ka" (not capitalized, of course. in the Soviet editions of The Brothers Kamazov) is a diminutive of the word "Bog," which means "God." dialectical essence of the fallen world. Thus if the drama of images through which the narrator portrays the suffering of al1 the characters in The Brothers Karamazov mirron the suffe~gof the one who could redeem their suffering because of the infinite agony he himself suffered on the cross, then Ivan is no less justified in denying the possibility of that harmony because of the infinite tragedy of a single girl's "unexpiated tears": "They must be expiated, for othenvise there cannot be harmony" (I 309). This drama of images moreover depends on the negation of Ivan's dialectic for its potential to draw the outline of a God beyond images. Through the voices of his narrator and characters. Dostoevsky traces images at the limits of human understanding, but he needs their consciousnesses to appropriate these images and the raw existence they represent in order to invert and subvert interpretations of heaven and earth through the endless negation of the dialectic. Hence Dostoevsky's temble garnble with his double Ivan: in the portrait of every suffering child lies the possibility of God. By subjecting images of suffering to the dialectic of belief and the dialectic of belief to the horror of these images, Ivan radicdly reduces the aesthetic distance between his pictures and the subject's gazing eye and between philosophy and the disinterested mind. Through the immediacy of his dialectical image of a sufTenng girl tearfùlly praying to her God, an irnmediacy that at its unattainable lirnit approaches the transparency. density and depthlessness of an icon, some trace of the beauty of the apokatastatic, universal harmony beyond time can be perceived within time. Ivan's conversation with Alyosha in the tavern falls outside the major plotline in the narrative, and both Ivan's dialectic and the narrative of the girl's suffering during her night in the privy are arrested in the image of her tearful prayer to God. Although he repudiates beforehand any future, universai harmony based on the sufferings of children, Ivan does not negate the beauty of the tears upon which he justifies this negation. The five-year-old's tears are worth more than universal harmony. a dialectic that preserves the beauty of that harmony by refùsing to compromise the hope of the girl's prayer. Ivan's dialectic aesthetically anticipates Adorno's insight "that there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror. withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better" (Minima Moralia 25). The beauty of the image of the suffering girl is not just the result of the harmony of the contradictions stilled within it, but also the harmony of suffering shared. Ivan's suferhg and the suffering of the girl are mirrored by Aiyosha's quiet response to Ivan's offer "to stop" that "1 too want to suffer [MYLIMTXR]~~( 1 306). TO gaze at such beauty with human eyes and £rom within time is nevertheless a "fearful and temble thing," for the antinomies of existence and of human understanding are not resolved within beauty but arrested there for consciousness at the moment of their greatest oppositions. for beauty is where "the shores meet, [where] aii contradictions live togethef' ( 1 2 56). In his article "Mr. -bov and the Question about Art," Dostoevsky defends the need for art:

The need [~OT~~~HOCT~]for art arises most of al1 when a person is in discord [B pamase] with reality, in disharmony, in struggle, that is, when a person /ives tnosf. because a person lives most precisely when he searches for something and strives for something; it is then that the natural desire emerges in him most for al1 that is harmonious, for tranquillity [cno~oiicrsue],and in beauty there is both harmony and tranquillity. (1 1 76, 77) Ivan's dialectical image of the suffenng five-year-old girl does not evoke the melancholic experience that the gaze of a troubled sou1 at a classically beautifùl art does. The beauty of the dialectical image illuminates al1 contradictions at al1 their most irresolvable, most terribng, and most discordant moment. At the limit of this discord, the intensity of the contradictions and the depth of suffering within the image render al1 moral or aesthetic judgment problematic. Even a skeptical solace in the suspension ofjudgment is problematic, for the crisis of judgment Ivan explores between the thesis that "suffering exists, and no one is guilty" and his desire for "vengeance" (1 307) negates any complacency and indifference in the gaze at suEenng. If al1 that survives the dialectic is the compassionate gaze at the image of suRering, then this gaze is fully melancholic because the distance suffenng itseifcreates cannot be completely erased even as the movement of compassion shatters aesthetic distance. At the limit of the negation of the word al1 that remains is the image of a suffering five-year-old girl, locked in a privy al1 night and praying to God, an image that is aesthetically imrnediate to a painfùl degree precisely because the word has negated the palliatives of human comprehension and with human comprehension its own justification for being. Nevertheless, despite this immediacy, the suffering and loneliness of this suRering five-year-old cannot be relieved or redeemed through the compassionate gaze of Ivan, Alyosha or the reader. The aesthetic distance of representation remains between Ivan and Alyosha and the girl, and between the reader and those suffering in the novet. Because of the distance of representation, the beauty of this dialectical image illuminates oniy the shadow of a possible transfiguration. Moreover, the fragile possibility for intersubjective harmony seems to depend precisely on the moment Ivan chooses to arrest his dialectic. 1s it perhaps aesthetically easier to experience compassion for psychological suffering than for physical pain, for a five-year-old girl when she cries alone in a privy than when her parents physicalIy beat her? Although it can be argued that the highest threshold of suffenng is reached not in the physiological experience of pain but through the psychological experience of inconsolable grief, such an argument degenerates into a cornplacent body/soul duaIisrn if it nihilistically rninirnizes the value of pain in the flesh. Moreover, any redemption of the five-year-old girl's physical suffering through compassion or the psychologicai consolation of grief begs Ivan's question concerninç the possibility of redemption. Ivan begins the chapter "Rebellion" by suggesting that a certain saint John the Mercifui, who lay al1 night with a frozen man and breathed into his disease- infested mouth, must have done so "frorn a lawful love arising fi-om duty" rather than from a genuine love. Alyosha considers such love possible, but Ivan's raising of the problem itself suggests that a person's capacity for compassion before physical pain may be psycho logically limited. Lastly, the contradictions of Ivan's dialectic attain much of t heir theodistic magnitude from the assumption that children have not "eaten the apple and understood good and evil and becorne like gods" (1 301). Zosima implicitly agrees with Ivan's thesis when he says tliat children are "sinless, like angels" (1 39 1). and the two children under nine in The Brothers Karamazov, Kostya and Nastya, engage in an innocent speculation about how a woman can become pregnant without a husband (2 2 19). As Rozanov suggests, by denying original sin, Dostoevsky "thought that the suffenng of children was something absolute" (108). If the suffenng of children is an absolute evil. then al1 justice in heaven and on earth threatens to fa11 absolutely. Instead of arguing whether children are naturally good or evil, it is possible to question when, precisely, humans should be held responsible for a postlapsarian knowledge of good and evil. More ominous than Zosima's, Dostoevslqh or Ivan's monological idealizations of children or the portraits of Kostya and Nastya, this question already silently hovers over the ponraits Dostoevsky draws of adolescent schoolboys and even over the portraits of Fyodor and Mitya Karamazov, whose debaucheries and cruelties retain an Edenic quality even at their most homfic moments. Nevertheless, the existence of evil cannot be undialectically dissolved by proclaiming the world of The Brothers Karamazov to be prelapsarian. Cutting through the antinomies Ivan develops in the chapter "Rebellion," the fourteen-year-old Lise Khokhlakova refuses to allow her desire for eviI to be brushed away by the excuse that she is too young to understand evil. As he receives a sexual proposition from Lise in a letter delivered to him by Alyosha, Ivan calls her a "little demon [oecenoh-1" (2 305). If Lise is a little demon. then she is no less a holy fool. The split in her personality between good and evil is reflected not oniy in the evolution within the timeline of the novel from her engagement with Alyosha and her habit of praying before an icon of Virgin to her sexual offer to Ivan and the temptation of the image of setting her house on fire, but also in her sudden and extreme mood swings from malice to humility, from caprice to confession and from mockery to tears. The kenotic tradition of being "fools for Christ's sake" (1 Corinthians 4: 10) has deep historical roots in Russian hagiography and there are many "holy fools" in Dostoevsky's novels. Lise and the epiieptic Smerdyakov represent two of the rnost problematic members of a group of characters that include Sonya Mameladova in Crime and Punishment, Myshkin in The Idiot, Maria Timofeevna in The Devils, and Lizaveta Smerdyashchaya in The Brothers Karamazov. In Dostoevsky's adaptation of t his kenotic tradition, hagiography, the literary convention of the fool and abnormal psycliology are intertextually woven. His kenotic characters suffer both painhl psychological disorders (almost always epilepsy) and society's low regard for their intellectual capacities in light of these disorders. If only a fool can speak the truth, then the holy fool in DostoevsLiy's novels only amves at the truth through humiliating and painfül suffering. Society's condescension paradoxically permits these characters to behave and to speak honestly and directly, outside societal norms, ofien with penetrating insight and witliout full societal accountability for their actions and words. Within this vast semantic space, the words of the holy fool signify at threshold between idiocy and prophecy. What makes Smerdyakov and Lise problematic "holy fools" (beyond the question of their religious convictions) is the former's manipulation of his epilepsy and his assumed idiocy in the murder of Fyodor and the latter's rejection that she is psychologically ill. Unlike most "holy fools" in Dostoevsky's novels, Lise is not epileptic. The precise nature of her psychological illness remains an enigrna and it is even possible that she is not ill. In the Chapter "Devout Peasant Wornen," the narrator notes that she "suffered from paraiysis of the legs" and that "her face was thin from the illness" (1 86). Her mother Madame Khokhalova teils Zosirna that "her fevers have completely disappeared for two dayç" (1 93). Mer the two month hiatus in the timeline of the novel, she is no longer sitting in a wheel chair and has physically recovered from her paralysis. Nevert heless, her psychological health seems to have deteriorated as she is haunted by demonic dreams and fantasies, has hystencs, contemplates suicide and strikes the household servant Julia. Her rnood swings also have grzdually gaineci in intensity. An hour &er striking Julia in the face Lise "hugged and kissed her knees" and just before sending Alyosha with the letter to Ivan she implores him to "save" her: "Will you cry about me, will you? ....I need only your tears" (2 289). Even more than Ivan's dialectic of suffering children and universal harmony, Lise's tenacious defense of her desire for evi1 renders judgment both necessary and impossible. Madame Khokhlakova tells Alyosha that Lise has had an attack of "ternporary insanity [a@@e~r]"(2 282), a notion whose legal ramifications she had just subjected to a burlesque and unintentional satire. In the following chapter "The Little Devil." Aiyosha quietly suggests to Lise that her desire for "disorder [6ecnopnnor]" is a result of her having lived "too well off." Lise rejects this socioloçical reduction of her will: "If t were poor, I would kill someone - and if 1 were rich, 1 would likely kill someone as well" (2 285). Wben Lise expresses her desire to bum down her house, Alyosha suggests that her "former illness" is responsible. Lise reacts even more violently: "You despise me that much. 1 simply don't want to do good. 1want to do evil, and it's got nothing to do wit h illness" (2 286). Aiyosha seeks to relieve Lise's psychological suffering by sugçesting to her that what she is experiencing is natural. By marginalizing her responsibility for the evil she desires, however, he avoids an understanding of this desire fiom Lise's own perspective and instead imposes on her suffering sociological and psychological etiologies foreign to Lise's own psychological experience. Thus the harmony of compassion between Alyosha and Lise temporarily threatens to become lost in the power play of scom and pity lurking within sociological and psychological judgment. By insisting on her desire for evil. Lise furthemore prevents the judgrnents of Enlightenment science frorn erasing the need for moral judgment of evil. Lise yeams for the judgment oEGod: "1 would corne, and they would judge me, but then suddenly 1 would laugh in their faces" (2 285). Nevertheless, more than her young age, her social class and or the possibility that she is ill. the intensity of her psychological suffering leads to a cnsis of moral judgment. Seerningly caught in a dialectic between a psychological illness that leads to evil thoughts and penlous thoughts that shatter psychological stability, Lise both speaks with the semantic freedom of the holy fool and attains the psychological insight of the Underground Man. Aiyosha does not distance himself fi-om her psychological suffenng through moral or scientific judgment, but even pushes and clarifies her insights on human evil and confims them from his own psychological expenence. Alyosha also dreams of demons. His compassion for Lise is not a pity from above but one grounded in siinilar experience. Lise's suffering also problernatizes aesthetic judgment. She is sado-masochistic. desiring both "to destroy [pa3pyura~b]"herself and to dnnk pineapple compote while she watches a four-year-old child being crucified on a waIl(2 286, 288). Although it seems easier to perceive some trace of beauty in her own masochistic suffering then in her sadism, her aesthetic of sadisrn also belies deep, persona1 suffering. When she first read the account of a lew crucifying a boy, Lise says that "1 shook with tears al1 night. 1

imagined how the child [pe6ewoqeic] ckd and groaned ... but the thought of pineapple compote wouldn't leave me alone" (2 288). Alongside the sensual pieasure of the pineapple compote Lise experiences the horror of the four-year-old boy's tonnent. Although the pleasure of the compote seems part of the banal beauty of Sodom. her tears derive from an aesthetic of compassion. Furthemore. sadism as a limit experience represents a nesative image of the universal harmony. .4s T. A. Kasatkina writes in her article "Theodicy taken from [OT]Ivan Kararnazov," "the pleasure of another's torture and suffering is perhaps the last means through which a person can feel their inseparability [~eo~~enb~ocrb]from others. This is perhaps why the pieasure is so strong" (56)." Sadism opens onto a beauty not foreign to that of compassion, for the aesthetic of sadism depends precisely on the reduction of distance between one person's suffering and another's pleasure and on the concordance of these discordant Iimit experiences. If Lise's sadistic fantasies cut through the antinomy of beauty between a banal Sodom and the ideal harmony of Madoma, then her own masochism no less crystallizes the aesthetic contradictions of a suffering that is at once tragic and grotesque. In an act that simultaneously is visualiy shocking and that evokes unbearable compassion for her extreme self-hatred, Lise slarns her bedroorn door on her finger, watches the blood ooze from it and whispers to herself"mean, mean, mean, mean [nonnan]" (2 290)." This is the last image of Lise in the novel. Alone in her bedroom away from the compassionate gaze of Alyosha, the image of her bleeding finger is viewed only by herself and by the reader. Having subjected al1 moral and scientific judgment and even the indignity of suspending judgment to the paradoxes of a dialectic dl her own, Lise creates an image no less problematic for aesthetic judgment. The image of her bleeding finger is unheroic, even petty, indicating that suffering not only can be hodcbut banal. Nevertheless, the dialectical image illuminates not only her bleeding finger, but her masochistic contemplation of that finger and the lacerating self-hatred she expresses in the repeated word "mean." It is this word which renders the dialecticai image irnmediate. If the compassionate gaze has potential to transfigure an image of suffering by rendering it beautiful, then the compassionate viewer cannot deliberate on the messianic potential of this gaze through a one-sided assessment of that image's beauty without betraying that suffering. The beauty of the dialecticai image becomes possible only through an aesthetic immediacy beyond aesthetic judgment. In Lise's image even the aesthetic of suffering enters her dialectic. Lise reieases her despair and self-hatred by physically maiming herself, but the image of the bleeding finger that she herselfcontemplates from an aesthetic

34 In The Devils, Stavrogin seems dmvn to sadistic acts precisely because of his disintegrating indifference, an indifference which leads ultimately to his suicide. Beyond the lirnit of sadism. tliere lies only indifference and death. 3s The adjective .-podlaya"has been declined in the ferninine form. Thus a more litrral translation of "podlaya" would be "1 am mean." distance provides neither psychological relief from her suffenng nor an image that adequately reflects the depths of that suffering. If this image does reflect the depth of her suffering, then it nevertheless seems to coincide with the direction of her self-Ioathing. As she gazes at the blood oozing from her finger, is Lise aesthetically pleased, even in her utter despair, by the futility of her own self-punishrnent? Her spilt blood seems to be a parody of the resurrection for which she so desperately yearns from Alyosha but which she no less defiantly rejects. In his famous letter to N. D. Fonvizina fiom Siberia in Febniary of 1854, Dostoevsky writes that "there is nothing more beautifùl, more profound, more attractive, more reasonable and more manly than Christ" and that "if it should be proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if it renlly were so that truth is outside Christ, then 1 would rather stay with Christ than with the truth" (15 96). The opposition between truth and Christ in this letter is not simply an irrational statement of belief but expresses Dostoevsky's profound cornmitment both to a theology and an aesthetic of the imase. Nevertheless, if Christ is outside truth, then his image cannot itself incarnate tmth. No less than the Protestant reformers, Dostoevslq's Christianity is founded in the miracle of faith. but unlike the reformers this faith is not in the Word but in the image of Christ. The experience of gazing at an image of Christ without the incarnation of the Word is precisely the experience Holbein's Dead Christ offers. The stillness of Christ's body, with al1 its traces of the suffering he endured on the cross, becornes beautifid as a dialectical image through the suffering of a consciousness endlessly engaging the problem of belief The dialectical image itself illuminates the contradictions of moral and aesthetic judgment but for that very reason cannot resolve them. In Holbein's Dead Christ, there is no thought at which to rest as the gaze moves along the lines of Christ's body, fiom the scar on his riçht foot to his rolled-back eyes. Before the face of human misery, the only relief from the bleeding in the "crucible of doubt" is to close one's eyes. Truth attained withoui the suffering of doubt and without doubt before the face of suffeniig has no place in a theology of the image or in the images of a realist art. As Dostoevsky wrote in his notebook a year before begiming The Brothers Karamazov, "ody in realism is there no truth" (The Unpublished Dostoevskv 139). The Christ who appears in human form in "The Grand Inquisitor" has becorne beautifûl through suffex-ing and the full depths of this suffering are visible in his smile of infinite compassion. Nothing makes humans more beautiful, more compassionate and more worthy of redernption than suffering, and nothing more than suffering has the potential to transfigure humans in the image of Christ or validates the messianic hope of a universal harmony beyond time, but suffering no less disfigures the body, renders the mind diseased and undermines the justice of the created world and of universal harrnony and nothing more than images of physical pain alienates humans from one another and fi-om God. The tragedy of the kenotic Christ itselfmirrors this ambivalence within human suffering, for even he was forsaken by God at the crucifixion. Death, no Iess than resurrection, marks the end of human suffering and thus lies outside an aesthetic of suffering. Before Holbein's Dead Christ, there can be compassion for the agony Christ has dready experienced on the cross, but not for a flesh that no longer knows suffering. The dead Christ rests from suffering, alone in a tomb where time is no longer. Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Mordia: Reflections fiom Darnaged Life. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: NLB, 1974. ---. Ne~ativeDialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973 ---- "Theses on the Occult." Adorno: The Stars Down to Earth and other essays on the irrational in culture. Ed. Stephen Crook. London: Routledge, 1994. 128- 134. Bakhtin, Mihail. Problems of Dostoevskv's Poetics. Ed. and Trans. Cary1 Emerson. 1984. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

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