Frojd I Karamazovi

The Massachusetts Review, Inc.
The Sons Karamazov: Dostoevsky's Characters as Freudian Transformations

Author(s): Neal Bruss
Source: The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Spring, 1986), pp. 40-67
Published by: The Massachusetts Review, Inc.
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Neal Bruss
The Sons Karamazov:

Dostoevsky's Characters as
Freudian Transformations
"Dostoevsky and Parricide" (1928), Sigmund Freud inter
IN preted Dostoevsky's epileptoid seizures as "a self-punishment
for a death wish against a hated father:"1
The illness first came over him while he was still a boy, in the form
of a sudden, groundless melancholy, a feeling, as he later told his
friend Soloviev, as though he were going to die on the spot. And
there in fact followed a state exactly similar to real death. His
brother Andrey tells us that even when he was young
quite Fyodor
used to leave little notes about before he went to sleep, saying that he
was afraid he might fall into this death-like sleep during the night
and therefore begged that his burial should be postponed for five
days. (182)
Deathlike attacks, Freud writes, "signify an identification with a

dead person ... or with someone who is still alive and whom the
subject wishes dead," and, for a boy, "usually... the attack (which
is termed hysterical) is thus a self-punishment for a death-wish
against a hated father" (182-183). The moment of "supreme bliss"
before the attack "may be a record of the triumph and sense of
liberation felt on hearing the news of the death, to be followed
immediately by an all the more cruel punishment" (186). That
Dostoevsky did not have attacks in Siberia suggested to Freud that
"he accepted the undeserved punishment at the hands of the Little
Father, the Tsar, as a substitute for the punishment he deserved for
his sin against his real father" (186).
According to Freud's editor James Strachey (175-176), Freud
began writing this essay to be an introduction to a supplement
volume of drafts and source studies for the standard German
translation of The Brothers Karamazov. But when Theodore Reik
was sued for malpractice, Strachey states, Freud put the project
aside to write The Question of Lay Analysis and had difficulty
40

The Sons Karamazov
regaining interest in it. Freud's completed essay discusses The

Brothers Karamazov for little more than a page. (Instead, the essay
concludes with a five-page discussion of a story by Freud's con
temporary Stefan Zweig, who had written a book about Dos
toevsky. The story, "Four-and-Twenty-Hours in aWoman's Life,"
deals with a young man addicted like Dostoevsky to gambling.)
"Dostoevsky and Parricide" is one of four occasions in the 6,800
pages of Freud's writings in which he uses his technique of inter
preting by grammatical transformation.2 So rare and powerful a
device is the transformation that its appearance in the Dostoevsky
piece must be considered portentous?and suggestive of a way to
expand Freud's discussion of the novel.
Under the transformational technique, Freud represented a
repressed thought as an underlying clause or sentence, introduced
the ordinary negative as "the hall-mark of repression,"3 and then
derived explicit symptoms from the clause by negating one or
another of its parts. Freud represented Dostoevsky's underlying
parricidal wish as "'You wanted to kill your father in order to be
your father yourself!'" His first step uses the negative to replace the
clause's optative verb with the present indicative: "'Now you are
your father, but a dead father.'" A second step shifts the father into
the role of active agent, and the son into the object of punishment:
"'Now your father is killing you'" (185).
The transformational analysis in "Dostoevsky and Parricide" is
idiosyncratic in that it describes only one symptom, the seizures. In
its other three appearances, the transformation generates full
arrays of symptoms, and thus resembles a grammatical paradigm
or logical square of opposition?not, as in the Dostoevsky analy
sis, a single derivation or syllogism.
The implication, then, is that the Dostoevsky essay should also
have yielded an array of symptom-types?that the large part of the
Dostoevsky array ismissing. Given that the Karamazov project was
Freud's occasion for writing and that the novel received scant
treatment in the finished essay, there is justification for seeking the
rest of the transformational array in the novel.
Freud used the transformation to explain symptoms of a specific
type: pathological resolutions of conflicts over infantile desires. He
used it to show exhibitionism and voyeurism to be outcomes of a
prohibition against masturbatory "looking at one's own organ,"
and the common phantasies of paranoia and of "a child being
beaten" to be distorted representations of impermissible love. He
41

The Massachusetts Review
used it to interpret the beating-phantasies and Dostoevsky's seiz

ures as self-attacks transformed from aggressive impulses,
impulses.
The transformation, then, was not a general-purpose interpre
tive device like displacement or symbolism. Freud used it to chart
forcible deflections of infantile impulses into roles of exaggerated
activity or passivity. (Indeed, the grammatical passive transforma
tion figures in all of these analyses.) In other words, Freud used the
transformation to interpret unsuccessful outcomes of the Oedipal
crisis?understood not in the terms of the predicament of the
family triangle but in terms of its outcome: the child's develop
ment, with his parents' help, of a healthy psychical mechanism?
ego and superego?to mediate his desires and furnish him with an
identity.
That Freud applied the transformation to interpret unsuccessful
versions of ego formation would accord with a passing remark in a
discussion of therapeutic technique by the psychoanalyst Jan
Frank, that "Dostoevsky, in the triad of Dmitry, Alyosha, and Ivan,
created illustrative examples of ego styles."4 If the ego is that
component of the psyche which mediates between impulses, con
science and ordinary reality, "ego style" would surely be reflected
in the sons' actions in the novel, including their "styles" of coping
with their father.
In that page of "Dostoevsky and Parricide" on which Freud did
discuss the novel, he stated that "all of the brothers, except the
contrasted figure of Alyosha, are equally guilty" of the murder of
their thoughtless, dissipated father. In the novel, guilt for the
parricide is shifted progressively from one brother to the next. And
every one of the brothers (including the "contrasted" Alyosha,
whose second father, the elder Zossima, dies naturally) suffers a
seizure or a feverish delirium provoked by Fyodor Karamazov or
the thought of murdering him.
If Freud treated Dostoevsky's seizure as one transformation of a
parricidal wish, and if he implicitly placed Dostoevsky in a series
with the sons Karamazov as guilty of parricide, then the sons
Karamazov might be the unstated members of Freud's transforma
tional series in "Dostoevsky and Parricide." In other words, the
missing transformational variants may be discovered to have been
formulated by Dostoevsky himself, in the language of fictional
narrative rather than psychoanalysis?as the Karamazov sons.
Moreover, as we shall see, the series which Dostoevsky and the
42

The Sons Karamazov
Karamazov sons occupy cannot be completed (either in respect to

the novel or in terms of the psychodynamic it explores) without
another fitful son with a father-problem: little Ilyusha Snegiryov,
who tries to be his incompetent humiliated father's champion.
Freud states, "It can scarcely be owing to chance that three of the
masterpieces of
the literature of all time?the Oedipus Rex of
Sophocles, Shakespeare's Ham let and Dostoevsky's The Brother's
Karamazov?should all deal with the same subject, parricide"
(188). Freud wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams that Hamlet
differs from Oedipus in that inHamlet, "the child's wishful phan
tasy_remains repressed."5 The Brothers Karamazov differs from
Hamlet and Oedipus on a different parameter, in the freakishness
of the father, and its disruptive effects on the development of the
sons.
If the parricide and its prosecution comprise the novel's plot, the
character-formation of the sons is its psychological context. The
Karamazov brothers are bracketed by two larger groups of sons:
monks and schoolboys. Both groups are unsettled by problems
created by the absence or deficiencies of fathers. When Zossima dies
and his body releases "the odour of corruption," the monks "who
loved the late elder and had accepted the institution of elders with
devout obedience suddenly became terribly frightened of some
thing and, when they met, exchanged timid glances with one
another."6 Father Ferapont emerges from his hut to cast out devils,
challenging the institution of elders with the rule of asceticism. As
for the schoolboys, they become embroiled in a rock war against
their smallest member, Ilyusha, when he refuses to accept their
teasing about his father's humiliation by Dmitry Karamazov.
Thus, at the opening of the novel, every member of either group
is vexed with a crisis of morality and loyalty. The result is that,
with the Karamazovs, virtually every male character spends much
of the novel in a state of emotional turmoil induced by fathers.
Standard Oedipal theory assigns the father the role of giving the
son a code of conduct, in return for the son circumscribing his
desires. But these fathers have failed their sons?Zossima by leav
ing behind "so great and immediate an expectation of something
miraculous" (384); Ferapont for rising as another father's rival;
Ilyusha's father, Snegiryov, for accepting work as Fyodor's agent
against his son Dmitry; and perhaps Kolya Krasotkin's dead father
for leaving his son to develop into the brat whose diffidence would
lead to the bullying of Ilyusha.
43

No father arises to set these conflicts straight: Alyosha Kara

mazov does his best with the schoolboys, but in the speech which
ends the novel, he admits uncertainty about what the boys will
become. Dostoevsky's implication is that although the focus of the
novel is on the Karamazovs, every monk, every one of the school
boys, would constitute a "transformation" of dire Oedipalization,
had Dostoevsky told that story. Dostoevsky provides just enough
description of the willfulness of the boy Zossima and of Kolya to
represent a subgroup of Oedipal transformations at the periphery
of the novel, that of sons whose fathers died early in their child
hoods. The least conflicted solution to a defective father is not a
Karamazov's but Ilyusha's: he tries to compensate for his father's
inadequacy by taking upon himself the role of his father's cham
pion, generating himself the integrity that a father should provide,
in the name of his father.
The schoolboys are at the age when they are capable of their first
independent activity outside their homes?when they are emo
tionally distant from their mothers, whom they have replaced with
their peers. Whether he is waiting for a train between the tracks on
a dare, condescending to the peasants, or spurning and comforting
Ilyusha, Kolya magnetizes the schoolboys. (Smurov's parents for
bid him from playing with Kolya, but he does anyway [2: 615].)
As for the mothers Karamazov: Adelaida, Dmitry's mother,
quarreled with her husband, ran away from Fyodor with a semi
narian and died in a garret. Sophia, mother of Ivan and Alyosha,
eloped with Fyodor, died when Ivan was seven and Alyosha three.
Smerdyakov's mother, the holy innocent Stinking Lizaveta, whom
Karamazov apparently seduced on a dare from his drinking com
panions, jumped his fence nine months later, broke into his bath
house, gave birth to Smerdyakoy and died.
Dostoevsky hints obtrusively that he does not intend the devel
opmental probings in his novel to apply to the women characters.
One type of hint is bewilderment. On the second page the narrator
describes as "enigmatic" the passion of a young woman who
drowned herself in a river over a man whom she could have
married "because she wanted to be like Shakespeare's Ophelia" (4).
When Alyosha meets Grushenka and Katerina, he is "greatly
astonished" by Katerina's conflicting personality traits, and, atone
point, that the two rivals "seemed to be in love" (222, 174).
Lise Kokhlakov is the daughter whose psychology seems most
44

The Sons Karamazov
like the sons'. Ivan empathizes with her obtrusive, obsessive

thoughts of enjoying stewed pineapples whenever she reads about
a child's suffering. Alyosha admits to sharing her dream of being
pursued by devils for cursing God?a dream similar to Ivan's
conferences with the Devil, Dmitry's dream that "someone is chas
ing me," and Fyodor's drunken experience of feeling "over
whelmed by irrational terror and moral shock" (684,553,106). But
much of Lise's psychology remains mysterious, particularly her
confinement to a wheelchair, which is similar to her mother's
outbreak of leg pains during Rakitin's advances, and her alterna
tion between childishness and coquetry.
Mothers are largely written out of the novel. The monastery
excludes them?indeed, the Elder's audiences with women are a
prime object of Fy odor's mocking and Ferapont's criticism.
Kolya's doting mother cannot control him. Ilyusha's mother is
disturbed or retarded; according to Katerina, insane: when her son
is ill, she takes the gift of a toy cannon from him.
The clearest signal from Dostoevsky that the novel does not
pertain to female development is the cold water dumped on Snegir
yov and Alyosha by Varvara, Ilyusha's daughter, who, for this one
episode of the novel, had left "Petersburg and look[ing] for the
rights of the Russian women" to tend her suffering family (238).
When Alyosha visits their cottage, Varvara is infuriated by her
father's sanctimonies to him about divine providence:
"Oh, do stop playing the fool!" cried the girl at the window
unexpectedly, to her father with an air of disgust and
turning
disdain. "Some idiot comes along and you have to put us all to
shame!" (234)
Varvara is the novel's least developed character, and given her

combination of hard-headedness and commitment, one of the
most potentially complex. She is also the only character who is not
moved by Alyosha's innocent saintliness: indeed, she ignores him
except to refer to him as an "idiot"?as if to signal that the
problems of the male characters do not define all of human nature,
certainly not the nature of women like herself.
What the Karamazov sons do define are some possible Oedipal

resolutions when one's father is "[an] old clown" (40).
In his note to the reader, Dostoevsky refers to his novel as "a
chapter out of my hero's [Alyosha's] adolescence"?as a study of a
45

son as he passes into adulthood (xxvi). Alyosha's basic develop

mental problem, and that of his brothers, is to get beyond their
father's devaluation of their mothers and his abandonment of
them after the mothers' deaths.
Dostoevsky's narrator describes Fyodor in the first chapter as
"worthless and depraved . . .muddle-headed," "an ill-natured
clown," and "a most licentious man all his life" (3, 4). He is
depicted as embezzling from mothers and sons, philandering in
their presence, even forgetting that Ivan and Alyosha had the same
mother.
Let us treat Fyodor's "Karamazov sensuality" (90) not as a
distorted representation by Dostoevsky of the severity which Freud
attributes to Dostoevsky's own father but as a character study of a
different variety of defective father,
analysis rather than a symptom of a neurosis.
Unlike Laius and old Hamlet (and unlike Dostoevsky's father,
as Freud understood him), Fyodor Karamazov provides no model
which a son might use to temper his desire and identify himself as a
fulfillment and extension of his parents. Fyodor's vulgarity as
abuser of the boys' mothers lies beyond any villainy which Shake
speare conceived in Claudius as Gertrude's usurper. While the
youths Oedipus and Hamlet kill their paternal rivals, the only
Karamazov son who fights openly with his father, Dmitry, is
humiliated by him, over money and a woman. Fyodor is an
extension, or a mutation, of previous literary Oedipal villains.
In a Freudian transformational analysis, the unconscious
thought generating an array of symptoms is represented as a root
sentence. For the Karamazovs, that sentence should express the
sons' common their father. The sons' Karama
grievance against
zov predicament resembles that which Freud attributed to the
epileptoid Dostoevsky. But Freud's root sentence for Dostoevsky,
"You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself,"
is already several steps beyond the sons' initial position. It begs the
question of the novel's plot development, the exposition of the
different motivations for the parricide among the sons. Freud's
more general formulation of the "repressed thought" of paranoia
in the Schreber case might serve as a template for the underlying
clausal representation of the sons' predicament. Freud argued that
the clause underlying the varieties of (male) paranoia is, "I (aman)
[do not] love him." A representation of the grievance of the sons
Karamazov might be, "I [a son] cannot love my father."
46

The Sons Karamazov
To explicate Dostoevsky's "transformations" of this predica

ment does not call for "deep" interpretation of the novel by Freud's
most familiar method: treating the text like a dream and undoing
distortions imposed on unconscious thoughts by primary pro
cesses. Freud uses this "deep" method to elucide the meaning of
literature such as the Prometheus myth and Hoffmann's "The
Sand-Man."7 For an analysis of literary "ego styles," the appro
priate method is that which Freud applied toNorbert Hanold, the
hero of Gradiva, and to the historical Leonardo: a simple gather
ing and sorting of ordinary behavior.8 Indeed, only one device from
Freud's method of "deep" interpretation is needed for the sons, a
device which Freud discussed most intensely, and one central to the
spiritual problem of The Brothers Karamazov: the symbolic equiv
alence of "God" and "father."9
If Dostoevsky can be credited with a thesis in his elaboration of
the sons' character, it would be identical to one of Freud's in
"Dostoevsky and Parricide": that an effort to cope with a grievance
against a defective father exacts an accommodation in the charac
ter-formation of a son. The sons Karamazov do not simply trans
form "I (a son) cannot love my father" into "I (a son) hate my
father." They do not simply hate their father. In Dostoevsky's
depiction, a son cannot simply hate his father. Most appropriately,
Dostoevsky puts a tendentious version of this observation in the
mouth of the Grand Inquisitor, who represents the father in Ivan's
story but speaks in Ivan's own voice of a 'rebel' son. The Inquisitor
tells Jesus?the Son addressed as if he were the Father?that the
sons' rebellion does not bring justice, and that the sons themselves
cannot tolerate their own rebellion against the Father:
They will pay dearly for it. They will tear down the temples and
drench the earth with blood. But they will realize at last, the foolish
children, that although they are rebels, they are impotent rebels
who are unable to keep up with their rebellion. into
Dissolving
foolish tears, they will admit at last that he who created them rebels
must undoubtedly have meant to laugh at them. They will say so in
despair, and their utterance will be a blasphemy which will make
them still more for man's nature cannot endure blas
unhappy,
phemy and in the end will always avenge it on itself. (300-301)
The sons' effort to cope with their grievance might be represented

with a second negative in the underlying sentence: "It is not the
case that I (a son) cannot love my father."
47

The sons' varied approaches to coping with their grievance

involve the same exaggeration of activity and passivity that Freud
described in his transformational analyses of the beating and para
noid phantasies, Dostoevsky's seizures and the advent of exhibi
tionism and voyeurism. Two sons display exaggerated activity:
Dmitry quarrels hysterically with his father, and Alyosha attempts
to express "active love" as his Elder charges him. The other two
sons tend toward passivity: Ivan condescends to the other charac
ters, and Smerdyakov plays the part of a cowardly, simple-minded,
eunuch-like epileptic. Both types of roles require character
distortion. The two passive sons diminish themselves, Ivan by a
cynic's refusal to act, Smerdyakov by the appearance of innocence.
The two active sons distort the character of their father by magnifi
cation, Dmitry in his extreme vulnerability to his father's provoca
tion, and Alyosha in raising for himself a second, saintly father, the
Elder, in the image of his mother.
Dmitry
The eldest son Dmitry is the only one whom Dostoevsky created
in the image of the father. At the time of the novel, Dmitry is
irresponsible and dissipated. He seduces young girls, and relishes
playing "a filthy, swinish trick" of condescension on Katerina
when she comes to his apartment for a loan to save her own father
(131). But Dmitry, whose mother is described as having been
"short-tempered" (5), is not a replica of "the old clown." Dmitry is
perpetually in debt and prone to quarrels which lead to further
problems:
he did not finish his course at the school, entered a

secondary
military college... a duel, reduced to the ranks, again
fought [was]
obtained a promotion, led a riotous life and spent, comparatively
speaking, a great deal of money. (8)10
Dmitry's rashness thus prevents his replicating his father. He is

also prevented by his sweetness, and by his criticism of his father in
himself. The examining magistrate describes him as "'more
sinned against than sinning_an honorable young man at heart,
but one who, alas, has been carried away to a rather excessive extent
by certain passions'" (598).
At the time of the novel, Dmitry's debts and anger are directed at
his father. It is his father's likely filching of his maternal inheri
48

The Sons Karamazov
tance that draws Dmitry to his father's home. His father's apparent
success at attracting Grushenka, possibly with the inheritance, and
employing her against him prompts Dmitry to make murderous
threats against his father in public.
Dmitry's "honorable[ness] at heart" expresses itself as an effort
to extinguish his anger, cease his attacks on his father, and feel
affection for him. Dmitry's attorney states that he
is just such a two-sided nature, a nature that could balance himself

between two one that when driven by the most
precariously abysses,
uncontrollable craving for dissipation can pull itself up if some
thing happened to strike it on the other side. And the other side is
love . . .
he may have driven away the horrible phantoms that haunted his
childhood dreams and longed with all his heart to justify and to
embrace his father! (864, 876-877)
Early in the novel, Dmitry "secretly reproached himself for many

particularly sharp outbursts in his arguments with his father" and
wished to temper them (33). He tells the Elder that he came to his
cell "to forgive [his father] and to ask forgiveness" (81). He tells
Alyosha that his attempt to get his father to lend him 3,000 rubles
to pay back money entrusted to him by Katerina, would be for
Fyodor "a last chance to be a father" (139).
In "Dostoevsky and Parricide," Freud interpreted the author's
gambling away his savings as a self-punishment for anger against
his father. Dostoevsky constructed Dmitry as compelled to similar
self-punishment, in seduction-attempts as well as finances. Dmitry
fails at venal conquests like his father's not only because his rage at
his father interferes with his actions and because his wish to love
his father tempers his competitiveness, but also because, having
hated his father's treatment of him, he criticizes his father's
impulses in his own. Where Fyodor "can find in every woman
something?damn it!?extraordinarily interesting" (159), Dmitry
tells Alyosha, "every decent man must be under the heel of some
woman" (698). Dmitry feels like killing himself with ecstasy at the
honorable outcome of his impulse to play the "swinish trick" on
Katerina. Although he also plans to shoot himself for failing to
return money Katerina entrusted to him, and nearly kills Grigory,
he restrains himself from killing his father, and is willing to defer
to the marriage suit of Grushenka's Polish officer?a widower and
seducer like his father.
49

The exaggerated quality of Dmitry's rage also serves as a self

punishment. His constant murderous threats against his father are
evidence of his guilt to members of the audience at his trial:
"Caught him cleverly at Mokroye, didn't they?"

"I suppose so. Boasted of it again. He's been telling it all over the
town hundreds of times."
"Couldn't resist it now. Vanity."
"A man with a grievance, ha, ha!" (854)
When he is arrested, Dmitry struggles to explain the two

sidedness of his attitudes toward his own behavior and toward his
father. His effort to forgive his father dominates his explanation,
for he cannot indict his father as the model for his own "mean
actions." He describes a lifelong conflict between impulses to act
like his father and an effort to be "honorable":
"You're to an honourable man?a most honourable man,

talking
don't lose of that, above all?a man who's committed lots of
sight
mean actions, but who has always been and still is a most honour
able human being, as a human being, inside, at bottom, and well, in
short, I?I'm afraid I don't know how to put it. I mean, what has
made me so unhappy all my life is that I longed to be an honourable
man, to be as it were a martyr to honour and to seek for it with a
lantern, with the lantern of Diogenes, and yet all my life I've been
playing dirty tricks on people like all of us, gentlemen?(542)
Dmitry cannot say that his father is like himself in playing dirty
tricks; he makes a universal comparison, "like all of us," rather
than the particular, "like my father." Dmitry's substitution of the
universal for his father is roughly reminiscent of Freud's megalo
manic fourth transformation of paranoia, which turned "I love
him" into "I hate everyone." But Dmitry is not satisfied with his
formulation, and thus disavows that dirty tricks have been played
by anyone other than himself:
"I mean, like me alone, gentlemen,

not like all, but like me alone.
I'm I was me me alone! ....
sorry, wrong?like alone, [original
ellipsis] Gentlemen, my head aches" (542)
He has spared his father his criticism by not stating his similarity to
him. He has been unable to state, "I am like my father in playing
next senten
dirty tricks on people." His "head aches," and in his
50

The Sons Karamazov
ces, he explains that he cannot judge his father because he resem

bles him?physically.
"You see, I didn't like the way he looked. There was

gentlemen,
something dishonourable about him, boastful and trampling on
everything sacred, jeering and lack of faith?horrible, horrible! But
now that he's dead, I think differently."
"Differently? How do you mean?"
"No, not but I'm sorry I hated him so much."
differently,
"You feel penitent?"
"No, not Don't write that down. I'm not very good
penitent.
looking myself, gentlemen, that's the truth. I'm not very handsome,
and that's why I had no right to consider him loathsome. Yes, that's
it. You can write that down." (543)
Dmitry's confession is bracketed by two dreams of conscience,

which can be interpreted through their contexts as expressions of
Dmitry's wish to free himself from his "swinishness." When his
examiners produce the brass pestle which he impulsively snatched
from Grushenka's pantry as he flew to his father's and used on
Grigory, Dmitry mentions a persistent dream
"that someone is chasing me?someone I'm terribly afraid of?
chasing me in the dark, at night?looking for me, and I hide

somewhere from behind a door or a cupboard?hide myself so
humiliatingly?and the worst of it is that he knew perfectly well
where I've hidden myself from him, but he seems to be pretending
deliberately not to know where I am, so as to prolong my agony, to
enjoy my terror to the full... [original ellipsis] That's what you're

doing now! It's just like that!"(553)
But after he admits hoarding Katerina's money (like his father

hoarded his inheritance), he is able to dream of himself caring
about a hungry . . . chilled to the marrow." In the dream,
"babby
Dmitry asks
"why the burnt-out mothers stand there? Why are people poor?
Why's the babby poor? Why's the steppe so bare? Why don't they
embrace and kiss one another? Why don't they sing joyous songs?
Why are they so black with black misfortune? Why don't they feed
the babby?" (596)
Thus, as the magistrate, the defense attorney and Dmitry himself

explain, Dmitry's character-solution to the defectiveness of his
51

father is to maintain both sides of a conflict. This ambivalence

might be represented: "I [a son not like my father] cannot love my
father, but I [a son like my father] cannot not love my father." The
underlying clause would be doubled to represent both sides. Dmi
try's similarity and difference in respect to his father would be
represented by the presence and absence of "not" in the two paren
thetical phrases. His effort to cope with a defective father would be
represented as the second negative, which justifies the doubling of
the underlying clause and appears in both clauses. In the paren
thetical of the first clause, the negative would mark that aspect of
Dmitry which is "not like" his father and quarrels with him. In the
second clause, as in Dmitry's remarks to his interrogators, that
aspect of Dmitry which he acknowledges as like his father "cannot
not love" him: the second negative would mark Dmitry's refusal to
hate. (Dmitry's self-criticism might be represented by another
transformation: "I (a son like my father) cannot love my father in
myself.")
Ivan
All three sons from Fyodor's two marriages are ignored by him
after their mothers' deaths. In his testimony at Dmitry's murder
trial, the village doctor recalls Dmitry:
"he was a little chap so high, abandoned by his father in the
backyard, where he used to run about in the dirt without his boots
and his little breeches hanging by one button..." [original ellipsis]
(793)
But Dmitry was treated kindly by Grigory. Dmitry recalls:
"That old man?why, he used to carry me in his arms,

gentlemen,
washed me in the tub when I, a three-year-old child, was abandoned
by everybody. He was like a father tome!" (539)
Ivan and Alyosha, in contrast, were taken in by the wife of a

general, their mother's "benefactress, her instructor, and her tor
menter." As a child in the "benefactress's" home, Sophia had
"attempted to hang herself from a nail in a box-room." (While
Dmitry's mother was "fearless, impatient, dark-complexioned,
endowed with extraordinary physical strength" and beat her hus
band, Sophia was "terrorized since her childhood" and suffered
"terrible fits of hysteria" [5,11].) Because their foster parentage was
that much crueller than Dmitry's, Ivan and Alyosha might be
52

The Sons Karamazov
expected to require greater exertions to cope with their grievances

against their father.
Ivan, like Dmitry, feels conflicting feelings toward his father.
But while Dmitry openly expresses both his rage and wish to
forgive, Ivan contains the same two attitudes in a compromise
expression, a pose of tolerance occasionally broken by an expres
sion of contempt.
Dmitry's rage against his father has the "adult" justifications of
his inheritance-dispute and competition for Grushenka. Ivan's
rage seems fixed on grievances of early childhood, of a helpless
child abandoned by his father. Ivan's indictment of God, the
Father, for allowing the torture of children by parents and surro
gates, expresses Ivan's preoccupation with infantile abandonment
inminimally-camouflaged terms. Ivan's rage ismore intense than
Dmitry's, and barely manageable: Ivan, unlike Dmitry, truly
"hates," rather than "cannot love," his father. As Ivan's delirious
acceptance of guilt for the parricide reveals, his pose of tolerance is
finally inadequate to contain his rage.
Ivan is described as becoming after his abandonment "a rather
morose young man," aware that he and Alyosha "were living
among strangers and on other people's charity, [and] that their
father was a man of whom one ought to be ashamed to talk" (13).
But when the adult Dmitry asks Ivan to mediate the "daggers
drawn" argument with his father, Ivan moves into his father's
home. "Both of them seemed to be getting on marvellously
together," even though his father recognizes when Ivan does not
stop him from talking nonsense "out of sheer spite," that he had
"come to live with me and... despise me in my own house" (158).
Ivan's hatred overflows his pose of tolerance before the murder,
when he abstains from guarding his father against Dmitry and
Smerdyakov. He tells Alyosha, "One reptile will devour another
reptile, and serves them both right" (164).
The instability of Ivan's pose of tolerance expresses itself in his
intellectual play with conflicting positions. He hedges in debate
with Alyosha by refusing to answer whether anyone "has the right
to decide who deserves to live and who doesn't," but then allowing
a person "the right to wish [the death of another]" (166-167). Both
the woefulness of his grievance and his inhibition against attack
ing his father are expressed most dramatically in his questioning
how God can be good and omnipotent when there is evil in the
world.
53

Before the time of the novel, Ivan had written a widely-read essay
arguing for a theocracy?universal rule under the Father?that
"several shrewd persons decided . . .was but an imperti
nothing
nent practical joke" (14). Speaking of the essay, the monastery
librarian virtually describes Ivan's mechanism of concealing
hatred by tolerance: "There's a great number of new ideas in it, but
they seem to cut both ways" (66). Rakitin states of Ivan's writing
and philosophy,
"Your brother Ivan is writing theological articles at present as a

joke and for some idiotic reason, for he himself is an atheist, and this
Ivan, this brother of yours, himself admits that what he's doing is
mean and . . .
despicable.
"You've heard his stupid theory, haven't you? If there is no immor
tality of the soul, there is no virtue, which means that everything is
He's a dirty little boaster, but what it all comes down
permitted.'...
to is that 'on the one hand, we cannot but admit, and on the other
we cannot but confess.' His whole is nothing but a dirty
theory
trick!" (90-92)
Conversing with Alyosha before the murder at an inn, Ivan

delivers the prologue and tale of the Grand Inquisitor. He begins,
"I wanted to discuss the suffering of humanity in general, but
perhaps we'd confine ourselves to the sufferings of children." (277)

Ivan tells his brother, "T too love little children terribly,'" who
"'suffer on earth ... for their "'who have eaten
terribly fathers,'"
the apple and know good and evil and have become "'"like
Gods.'"" Ivan seems to be condemning his father, but in his next
sentence he identifies himself with his father by adding that men
like himself, "cruel men, passionate and carnal men, Karamazovs,
are sometimes very fond of children" (278). Ivan spares his father
from criticism here by separating the "cruel" Karamazov in whose
voice he
thinks he is speaking from those adults who victimize
children, and from the children themselves.
In the body of the prologue, Ivan describes children's torture by
adults, especially parents, at such length that he remarks that he
must be torturing his brother. Ivan then concludes the prologue by
stating that he "'cannot accept'" and must "'renounce [a] higher
harmony altogether'" in which, at the end of days, a mother will
embrace her child's torturer and join in the declaration of the
Father's justice (286). If "father" is substituted for "God," the
54

The Sons Karamazov
prologue becomes an indictment of an uncaring Fyodor whose

attention was elsewhere as his children suffered in the terrible care
of their guardians. But Ivan withholds criticism from his father
again: even though Ivan would not have the mother praise God's
justice, he stops short of condemning the Father, instead rejecting
the idea of a mother forgiving the torturer of her child before the
"
divine throne as the harmony of creation is revealed: 'It is not God
that I do not accept.... Imerely most respectfully return him the
ticket'" (287).
Ivan spares the Father a third time in the climax of his tale of the
Grand Inquisitor. Ivan had heard his father tell Smerdyakov that
he'd "'go straight to hell and be roasted there like mutton'" (148)
for his heretical discourse on avoiding torture and damnation. At
the opening of Ivan's tale, the Inquisitor is burning heretics at the
stake, and thus the Inquisition can be read as a literary substitute
by-association by Ivan for Fyodor's treatment of his children.
Indeed, the Inquisitor's two basic traits are the reversal and
intellectualization of "Karamazov sensuality." Rather than the
fleshy, bloated appearance which Dmitry loathed in his father and
himself, the Inquisitor's face is "shrivelled," with "bloodless, aged
lips" (292, 309). Where Fyodor enjoys dissipation, lies, and clown
ing, the Inquisitor rules by "miracle, mystery and authority" (308).
After the Inquisitor's discourse in which Ivan lets the father
torturer expound his own views on the inappropriateness of free
dom for the human majority, the Son has his victory. But Ivan
spares the father again. Although the setting is the Inquisition,
Ivan depicts the Son as acting as tolerantly toward the Inquisitor as
he acts toward his own father. The Son defeats the murderous
father in the tale by a reversal of condemnation?a kiss. The Son
then accepts the Inquisitor's banishing, and walks away from the
scene of tortue. '"The kiss glows in his heart, but the old man sticks
to his ideas'" (308), and presumably goes back to torturing his
children in the auto-da-fe.
The substitution of "father" for "God" explains also the fallacy
in Ivan's philosophy by which Smerdyakov can suggest Ivan's
responsibility for his murder of their father: if there is no God?
that is, if there is no consciousness of the father?then everything is
permitted, including parricide. But if there is no father, there can
be no parricide. And if there has been parricide?if someone has
acted as if everything is permitted?then there had to be a real
father, and everything may not be permitted. (The possibility that
55

there is a good father is expressed by Ivan's devil in his tale of the

atheist philosopher who died, discovered that there was a paradise
open to him, and was damned because he declared it" 'against [his]
principles'"[756].)
Thus, a clausal representation for Ivan's character-solution to
his father would double the root-sentence, as in Dmitry's transfor
mation, to represent ambivalence. But itwould have to represent as
well the greater intensity of Ivan's grievance as "hate," and the
proximity of the conflicting attitudes in his pose which suggested
"
"an impertinent joke" to his readers and an argument which 'cuts
both ways'" to the monastery librarian in particular. Ivan's solu
tion might be represented, "I do not hate my 'father,' but I hate my
father." The son's effort to cope with his grievance is here realized
not only by the negation of "hate" but as irony quotes: as long as he
can treat his father cynically, Ivan is protected against the explo
sion of his rage. But Ivan's second clause, which expresses his rage,
"I hate my father," is untransformed, untouched by the effort.
Under Smerdyakov's influence, the defense of irony fails, and Ivan
is left with the full weight of the hatred represented in the seond
clause.
Smerdyakov
Ivan's tolerance of his father is a mitigated variant of the obse
quiousness with which Smerdyakov addresses everyone in the
Karamazov household. The expressions of contempt which escape
occasionally from Ivan are less intense than Smerdyakov's com
parable displays?his childhood torture of animals, murder of
Fyodor, baiting of Ivan, and his suicide, when Ivan finds the
resolve to bring him to court. If the sons' initial predicament is
represented, "I cannot love my father," Smerdyakov's transforma
tion involves self-deprecation and generalizing of his hatred from
his father to Ivan and everyone else. Dmitry's defense attorney
describes the universalized hatred underlying Smerdyakov's dis
play of infirmity:
"It is true he was weak in health, but in character, in spirit?oh, no,

he was not by any means the weak man... I certainly did not find a
trace of timidity in him... Neither was there any trace of simplicity
in him; on the contrary, I found in him a terrible mistrustfulness
concealed under a cloak of naivety, and an intelligence that was
capable of comprehending a great many things ... I left him with
the conviction that he was a
spiteful man, excessively ambitious,
56

The Sons Karamazov
vindictive, and envious ... he hated his was

violently parentage,
ashamed of it, and gnashed his teeth every time he remembered that
he was the son of "stinking Lizaveta." He treated Grigory and his
wife, who had looked after him in his childhood, with disrespect.
He cursed and jeered at Russia ... I believe he loved no one but
himself and that he had a strangely high opinion of himself . . .
Believing himself to be the illegitimate son of Fyodor Karamazov
(and there are facts which confirm it), he might well have resented
his position as compared with that of the legitimate sons of his
master: they had everything and he had nothing, they had all the
would get the inheritance, and he was a cook."
rights, they only
(871)
Smerdyakov's character-solution might be represented, "I am not

like my father or his sons?and I hate all of them." Even more than
Dmitry's attempt to pardon his father during his interrogation,
Smerdyakov's character solution is strikingly similar to one of
Freud's, his transformation for megalomania in the Schreber case:
"/ do not love at all?/ do not love anyone."
Of the sons Karamazov, Smerdyakov had been treated most
cruelly: Grigory, who tended the boy Dmitry "like a father," was
grim and harsh to Smerdyakov, who appeared just after the death
of his own, only child. Grigory tried to prevent the christening of
his son because it had been born with six fingers; Grigory referred
to him as 'a dragon,' and he died two weeks after the christening.
When the infant Smerdyakov was found new-born with his dying
mother in the Karamazov bathhouse, Grigory referred to him as
"born of the devil's son and a holy innocent" (114), but Grigory
and his kind wife Marfa adopted him.
As a boy Smerdyakov "was fond of hanging cats and burying
them with ceremony," but was caught by Grigory, "birched
severely," and told that he was "not a human being" but "came
from the bathhouse slime" (144-145). Grigory slapped Smerdya
kov harshly for the heresy of asking where the light came from for
the first days of creation if the sun and moon were created on the
fourth. This beating was the occasion of Smerdyakov's first epilep
tic seizure. Thereafter, he became squeamish, and "seemed to have
grown suddenly old... and began to look like a castrate" (145). But
his sadism persisted, and was the cause of Ilyusha Snegiryov's
guilty, fatal fever: from Smerdyakov Ilyusha learned to feed his dog
a pin hidden in a piece of bread.
Smerdyakov's underlying hatred of his father, like Ivan's, reveals
57

itself in a religious disquisition. Grigory had told the Karamazovs

at dinner about a Russian soldier who had not renounced God
under threat of torture. Smerdyakov argues closely in response that
the soldier could have escaped damnation if he had renounced
God. Ivan's tale is a rejection of the Father's world in which
innocents are tortured by parents. Smerdyakov explains a loophole
by which a person can evade persecution by a display of weakness.
In Smerdyakov's rationalization, a person denying God (the
Father) to evade martyrdom (torture in the name of the Father) can
escape damnation (torture after death in the name of the Father):
"you see, the moment I'm accursed by God, at that very moment, at
that highest moment, sir, I become entirely like a heathen, and my
baptism is taken off me and is considered null and void... if I'm no
more a Christian, then I can't be no lies to my torturers when
telling
they asks me whether I am a Christian or not, for God himself has
stripped me of my Christianity on account of my intention alone
and even before I've had time to say a word tomy torturers." (150)
But while Ivan's arguments are discussed respectfully by the

company in the elder's cell and by Alyosha at the inn, Smerdyakov
is taunted during his disquisition as "Balaam's ass" by Fyodor and
declared anathema by Grigory?and before Ivan (143-145). Fyodor
ribs Ivan to praise Smerdyakov's argument, telling Ivan that Smer
dyakov's story was "all for your benefit" (149). The hatred of the
Karamazovs concealed in Smerdyakov's deference is evident later
in the tone of arrogance with which he repeats to a neighbor two
Karamazov insults, Fyodor's statement that "the Russian peasant
must be flogged'' and Ivan's reference to him as "a stinking lackey''
(263).
Smerdyakov's "squeamishness," his "eunuch-like" manner
after his whipping by Grigory, served him originally as an
accommodation to his step-father's brutality. In the light of
Freud's analysis of Dostoevsky's seizures, Smerdyakov's epilepsy
should also be considered a self-punishment for, ameans of coping
with, thoughts of revenge. Smerdyakov's appearance of defective
ness would later serve him in a contrastive way, by distinguishing
"
him from his persecutors, expressing the 'strangely high opinion
"
of himself which Dmitry's attorney observed. Smerdyakov's pas
sivity serves him for an alibi. His feigned seizure allows him to
escape suspicion for the parricide, and his pose of simple
mindedness allows him to draw Ivan to accept responsibility for it:
58

The Sons Karamazov
"
'everything is permitted'. This you did teach me sir, for you talked
to me a lot about such things: for if there's no everlasting God,
there's no such as virtue, and there's no need of it at all. Yes,
thing
sir, you were about that. That's the way I reasoned."
right
"Did you think of it yourself?" Ivan asked with a wry smile.
"With your guidance, sir." (743)
Alyosha
Like Smerdyakov, Alyosha copes with his father by disavowing

carnality (Smerdyakov, his own; Alyosha, his father's) and trans
forming it into something female. The effort to cope with a
defective father seems to require each son to distort the image of
himself or his father. In different ways Dmitry and Smerdyakov
deform the images of themselves; Sophia's two sons, Ivan and
Alyosha, distort the image of their father. The distortions by the
two older brothers, Dmitry and Ivan, are less extensive than those
of their younger siblings. Dmitry's falling short of his father is a
less severe self-reduction than Smerdyakov's "appearance of a cas
''
trate. Ivan' s euphemistic characterization of his depraved father as
a "'reptile'" to whom he can condescend is less extreme than his
brother Alyosha's reconception of the father as the embodiment of
maternal love.
The transformations of the two younger sons also negate mascu
linity, as the mark of "Karamazov sensuality." Smerdyakov's fawn
ing is the denial of his own masculinity, leaving the image of his
father's masculinity un transformed. Alyosha invokes his mother's
devotion to the Russian church to raise for himself a second father
whom he cannot hate, the Elder Zossima.
Alyosha's condition is described by his friend Rakitin: "'A sen
sualist after your father and a saintly fool after your mother'" (90).
Alyosha's solution is suggested by Freud when he excluded Alyo
sha as the "contrasted figure" among the brothers guilty of the
parricide: Alyosha denies the possibility of hating his father in
redefining his saintly mother's capacity for love as a fatherly trait,
embodied by the Elder. Alyosha's identification with the Elder, in
turn, further inspires him to love rather than hate his Karamazov
father.
Thus, Alyosha's transformation might be represented, "I do not
hate my father, I love my father, because my Father is like my
mother." Alyosha's transformation doubles the reference of "fath
er," like the irony quotes in Ivan's transformation: for Alyosha, the
59

first two mentions refer to Fyodor Karamazov, the third to the

Elder?an ambiguity for the purpose of defense. The second nega
tive is realized as the replacement of 'love' for 'hate,' and the
introduction of 'mother' in the father's place. In manipulating the
lexical opposites, "love" and "hate," and "father" and "mother,"
Alyosha's transformation is the most similar of the sons' to Freud's
definitive transformations in the Schreber case.
Alyosha comes to the Russian church through a single unper
ishing memory of his mother:
only in his fourth year when his mother died, he remembered her all
his life?her face, her caresses, as she werestanding
"just though
alive before me" ... all he remembered was an evening, a
quiet
summer an open window, the rays of the setting
evening, slanting
sun (it was the slanting rays that he remembered most of all), an
icon in the corner of the room, a lighted lamp in front of it, and on
her knees before the icon his mother, sobbing as though in hyster
ics, snatching him up in her arms, hugging him to her breast so
tightly that it hurt, and praying for him to the Virgin. (17)
Beyond this narrative link, Dostoevsky has motivated Alyosha's

solution of recreating the father in the image of the mother in the
terms of the Elder's spiritual vocation: to provide adults with the
traditional maternal idea of nurturance and relief from conflict as
their Father. Zossima teaches "abiding, universal love," that every
one is really responsible for everyone and everything" (376, 339).
He tells Lise's mother that she can be assured of the reality of an
afterlife
the of active love. Strive to love your neighbors

"By experience
and And the nearer you come to achieving
actively indefatigably.
this love, the more convinced you will become of God and the
immortality of your soul. If you reach the point of complete self
lessness in your love of your neighbours, you will most certainly
regain your faith and no doubt can possibly enter your soul." (61)
He discharges Alyosha to service in the world, "in sorrow seek[ing]

happiness" (86), and Alyosha soon finds himself stoned and bitten
by Ilyusha for Dmitry's humiliation of Ilyusha's father. '"You'll
have to take a wife, too,'" Zossima says, and even before this he has
sent Alyosha to relieve Lise Khoklakov of her cruelty and self-hate.
That Dostoevsky thinks of such loving as originally a maternal
function is suggested by the Elder's contribution to the discussion
60

The Sons Karamazov
of Ivan's polemic that society be transformed into a Church, a

discussion which prefigures the novel's treatment of the parricide
and the terrible fates of Dmitry, Ivan and Smerdyakov. Zossima
states that in its judicial function, '"the Church, like a tender and
loving mother, refuses to have anything to do with punishment
herself... the Church... never loses contact with the criminal as a
dear and still precious son'" (72). Alyosha tells Lise, '"my elder said
that one had to care for people as one would for children, and for
some people as though they were patients in a hospital'" (253).
Dostoevsky has rendered the 'ego styles' of Alyosha's two fathers
as complements of giving and receiving. Karamazov loads his
egotism onto others, and Zossima relieves people of theirs. Fyodor
tells Alyosha that the Karamazovs "do everything contrary to
what's expected of us" (203). Indeed, Fyodor tries to degrade others
by being "a clown." Dostoevsky quotes his internal rationali
zation:
"It does indeed seem tome every time I go to see people that I am
more contemptible than anyone else and that everyone takes me for
a clown?so that's why I say to myself, all right, let me play the
clown, because you're all without more and more
exception stupid
contemptible than I."He wanted to revenge himself on everyone for
his own filthy tricks. (98)
Zossima's ego style can be understood in the definition of the

institution of elders:
An elder is a man who takes your soul and your will into his soul
and will. Having chosen your elder, you renounce your will and
yield it to him in complete submission and complete self

abnegation. This novitiate, this terrible discipline is accepted
voluntarily by the man who consecrates himself to this life in the
hope that after a long novitiate he will attain to such a degree of
self-mastery and that at last he will, after a life of
self-conquest
obedience, achieve complete freedom, that is to say, freedom from
himself, and so escape the fate of those who have lived their whole
lives without finding themselves in themselves. (28)
Thus: Fyodor forces his worst qualities on others to punish them

for his low self-esteem, while Zossima accepts the worst qualities of
others to free them from themselves.11 That Alyosha recognizes his
need to defend himself against tendencies like his father's is sug
gested by his admission to Dmitry during his confession of his
61

debaucheries the same as you,'" and to Rakitin

that "T'm that he
'"himself" has
thought about his father being murdered. The
severity of Alyosha's defense against "Karamazov sensuality" can
be seen in "his absurd and morbid modesty and chastity. He could
not bear to hear certain words and certain conversations about
women" (19).
Alyosha might be expected to falter in expressing active love if
he suffered a particularly intense dose of paternal "Karamazov
sensuality." Fyodor gives Alyosha such a dose in reminiscing
about a simultaneous offence against Alyosha's mother and their
religion:
"Well, I thought tomyself, let's knock that mysticism out of her.

'You see,' I said to her, 'you see your icon?there?well, look, I'm
to take it down. Now watch me. You think it's a miracle
going
working icon, don't you? But I'm going to spit on it in front of you
and nothing will happen to me!' As soon as she heard me, good
Lord, I thought she'd kill me on the spot. But she only jumped to
her feet, threw up her hands, then covered her face with them, began
shaking all over and fell on the floor?fell all of a heap.'" (160)
Dostoevsky's narrator continues:
The drunken old man had gone on and noticed nothing

spluttering
till the very moment when strange to
something happened
the same in fact, as had happened to the
Alyosha?exactly thing,
'shrieker' when he threatened to spit on her icon. Alyosha jumped
up from his seat, exactly as his mother had done, threw up his
hands, then buried his face in them and trembled all over in a
sudden fit of hysteria, shaking with silent sobs.
Alyosha suffers this seizure when his "ego style" is overwhelmed

as amechanism for coping with his father. Like?exactly like?his
mother, Alyosha is driven to the brink of mayhem: Fyodor himself
recognized that his wife's seizure occurred when she might have
killed him on the spot. These identical seizures of mother and son
under provocation strikingly resemble Dostoevsky's seizures in
Freud's account as self-punishments for parricidal thoughts, and
substitutes for murder.
Conclusion: Ilyusha Snegiryov
If feverish deliriums are taken as equivalents of seizures, each of
62

The Sons Karamazov
the Karamazov sons can be recognized as suffering seizures like

Alyosha and Sophia when their defenses against Fyodor are
exhausted.
Dmitry suffers his "delirium"?it is a chapter title?during his

flight to Mokroe when his wish to love his father has gained
ascendance over his grievance, when he has spared his father's life
and resolved to concede Grushenka to her suitor. From that
moment, despite his arrest and conviction, Dmitry arises as a "new
man," even one resolved to accept the "cross" of his sentence to
Siberia. Dmitry's "seizure" is the pain of a rebirth.
Ivan has his feverish meetings with the Devil when his pose no
longer can contain his rage, after the actual parricide and Smer
dyakov's blaming him for it. Ivan's consciousness is flooded by the
intentions he had repressed: in his delirium, he accepts guilt for his
hostile unconscious thoughts as if they had been actions.
Smerdyakov's outcome is the converse of Ivan's. Because of his
history of actual seizures, the feigned seizure enables him to escape
immediate suspicion for an actual murder. But this ruse sets in
motion the events which lead to Smerdyakov's absolute, uncom
promised self-punishment, suicide. Smerdyakov's ability to feign
seizures which he previously could not control implies that he has
exhausted not only his character-defense of pusillanimity but also
the original conviction, implied by his seizures, that his parricidal
impulses warranted prohibition.
Ilyusha Snegiryov's fatal fever arises from guilt, not at being an
angry son to his father, but a "cruel father" to his dog. Indeed,
Ilyusha's father refers to his son as if he were his father?as "old
fellow, dear old fellow" (904). Ilyusha is the only son in the novel
who displays uncomplicated love for a defective father: he serves as
his father's champion.
The character-solutions of the Karamazov sons to their griev
ance with their father vary according to the severity of their child
hoods. Likewise, Ilyusha's solution reflects the relatively small
dose of paternal defectiveness with which he has had to cope. His
father, Snegiryov, is not "selfish and depraved" like Fyodor, but
incompetent and humiliated. Katerina relates that "he seems to
have committed some offence in the army and been discharged,"
and was "completely destitute" when Dmitry dragged him out
into the street by his "bath-sponge" beard for carrying out Fyodor's
commission and "everyone laughed at him" (225). Alyosha sees in
his face
63

a sort of extreme arrogance and, which was so strange, at the same

time unconcealed cowardice ... There was a sort of weak-minded
humour in his words and the inflexion of his rather shrill voice,
spiteful and timid in turn, but unable to keep it up for any length of
time and faltering continuously. (231)
But Ilyusha, unlike the Karamazov sons, does not feel his father's
defects to be directed against him. Thus, Ilyusha could run behind
Dmitry as Dmitry dragged his father into the street, "crying and
begging for his father, appealing to everyone in the street to defend
him" (225). Afterward, Ilyusha still dreams of rescuing his father?
as far as Ilyusha's sense of reality will allow. Snegiryov recalls to
Alyosha:
"Daddy," he said. "I'll get rich, I'll become an officer and I'll
conquer everybody, and the Czar will reward me, and I'll come back
here and no one will then dare to?" Then after a pause he said, his
lips still trembling as before: "Daddy," he said, "what a horcid town
this is, Daddy!" (241)
Although Ilyusha attacked him savagely, Alyosha recognizes Ilyu

sha to have adopted a high-minded character-solution to his
father: "So your little boy is a good boy. He loves his father and
attacked me because I'm the brother of the man who insulted you"
(233). If each son's effort to cope with a defective father can be
represented, "It is not the case that I cannot love my father," then
Ilyusha has found a way for the negatives to cancel each other: his
transformation is, "I can love my [suffering] father."
Ilyusha is the only son in the novel whose defective father does
not die. This son dies instead, from the effects of poverty, his guilt
for his cruelty toward his dog, and perhaps from the psychic
burden of his inability to restore his father. '"When I die, get a good
boy?another one,'" he tells his father, '"choose one yourself from
all of them, a good one, call him Ilyusha and love him instead of
me. . . .'"
(657; original ellipsis).
The novel ends with Alyosha's enjoining the schoolboys after
Ilyusha's funeral that, in opposition to their "fear of becoming
bad" when they are older,
"there's more wholesome and more use
nothing higher, stronger,
ful in life than some good memory, especially when it goes back to
the days of your childhood, to the days of your life at home. You are
told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory
64

The Sons Karamazov
preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a

man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for
the rest of his days." (910-911)
Alyosha asks the boys to remember each other, and, finally,

Ilyusha,
"who has united us in this good and kind feeling which we shall
remember and intend to remember all our lives? Let us remember
his face and his clothes and his poor little boots, and his coffin, and
his unhappy and sinful father, and how bravely he stood up for him
alone against his whole class!" (912)
Unlike the four Karamazovs, Ilyusha required no ambivalence or

distortion to accommodate himself to his father. Perhaps as Dos
toevsky's exceptional transformation, Ilyusha's example to the
other sons may be read as a referent for the passage from St. John
which Dostoevsky chose for the novel's epigraph: "Verily, verily, I
say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it
abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."
NOTES
^'Dostoevsky and Parricide," translated by V. Woolf, in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud (hereaf
ter, Standard Edition), gen. ed. James Strachey, 23 vols. London: Hogarth
Press, and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953-1974). 21: 186.
Joseph Frank, in Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1949 (Prince
ton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 89, challenges Freud's "probable
assumption... that the attacks... did not assume an epileptic form until
after the shattering experience of his eighteenth year?the murder of his
father" (21:181). For this assumption to be refuted would not invalidate
Freud's of the seizures, but it does suggest a more widely
interpretation
symptomological and less narrowly biographical reading of Freud's
one which would greater on the interpreta
interpretation, place weight
tion of Dostoevsky's works. The Brothers Karamazov has been read in the
of Freud's essay, not in the terms of Freud's transforma
light although
tional framework. See Mark Kanzer, "Dostoevsky's Matricidal Impulses,"
in Joseph Coltrera, ed., Lives, Events and Other Players (Downstate
Psychoanalytic Institute Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Series, 4). New York
and London: Jason Aronson, 1981, pp. 295-309. See also J. R. Maze,
"Dostoevsky: Epilepsy, Mysticism and Homosexuality," American
Imago 38 (1981): 155-183; and Geoffrey Carter, "Freud and The Brothers
Karamazov/' Literature and Psychology 31 (1981): 15-31. Elizabeth Dal
ton, Unconscious Structures in The Idiot: A Study of Literature and
Psychoanalysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) has inter
preted expressions of parricide and its self-punishment in that novel.
65

For a psychoanalytic study of psychopathology based on developmen

tal conflicts between "Son and Father," including accounts of experiences
strikingly similar to those depicted of the Karamazovs, see the essay by
Peter Bios, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 32 (1984):
301-324.
2Freud's fullest, most explicit use of the transformation was his first:
the derivation of four types of paranoid symptoms in his (1911) commen
tary on Schreber's autobiography ("Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Auto
biographical Account of a Case of Paranoia [Dementia Paranoides]),

trans. Alix Strachey and James Strachey. Standard Edition 12: 63-65.
In "Instincts and their Vicissitudes" (1915; trans. C. M. Baines. Stan
dard Edition 14: 129-130), Freud uses the grammatical passive voice to
represent instinctual passivity, a defense which Freud calls "turning
about the self."
In "A Child is Being Beaten" (1917; trans. Alix Strachey and James
Strachey. Standard Edition 17: 185-189), Freud employs the transforma
tional technique to gloss the development of a common variety of phan
tasies in which "the child being beaten" is never the person having the
but a brother or sister, or some other child.
phantasy
3In "Negation," trans. Joan Riviere, Standard Edition 19: 236.
^'Indications and Contraindication for the Application of the Stand
ard Technique," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 4:
2(1956), p. 170.
translated by James Strachey. Standard Edition 4: 264.
translated by David Magarshack. Two vols (i-382, 383-913). (Balti
more: Penguin, 1958), 2: 390.
7"The Acquisition and Control of Fire," trans. Joan Riviere. Standard
Edition 22: 185-193. "The 'Uncanny'," trans. Alix Strachey. Standard
Edition 17: 219-256.
%Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva, trans. James Strachey.
Standard Edition 9: 1-95. Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his
Childhood, trans. Alan Tyson. Standard Edition 11: 57-137.
in Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey. Standard
Especially
Edition 13: vii-161.
10The formation of a child's personality in reaction to the personality of
a troubled parent is a central topic in psychoanalysis. Therese Benedek
describes a child's accommodation to an parent, in "Parent
inadequate
hood as a Developmental Phase," Journal of the American Psychoana
lytic Association 7 (1959):
The child in adapting to the parent's conflictual behavior either does not
learn new controls or may give up those which were already established. In
order to avoid emotional isolation from the parent, the child introjects the
conflict of the parent which threatens his security. In his "regressive
to the parent's conflictual behavior, the child incorporates a
adaptation"
"fixation," thus making certain that he will not become a better person
than his parent is. (pp. 403-404)
1 in the Elder's spiritual func

fyodor's behavior, and its complement
tion, strikingly suggest projective identification (and its introjection), a
66

The Sons Karamazov
primitive defense mechanism postulated by Melanie Klein in 1946, in

"Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms," in Envy and Gratitude and
Other Works, 1946-1963 The Writings of Melanie Klein 3, Roger Money
Kyrle (gen. ed.). International Psycho-Analytical Library 104) (London:
Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1975), pp. 1-24. In
Klein's account, an infant "understands" and other as
hunger pains
attacks by a "bad mother," and retaliates by imaginatively projecting its
"bad" parts into the mother it has "identified" as the source of those parts.
The infant then feels the depression of having harmed the mother, and
escapes by developing an sense of Karamazov would
integrated "objects."
be employing a form of projective identification or perhaps a related
mechanism such as "the evocation of a proxy," and Zossima, performing
the "maternal" function of containing and metabolizing the bad psychic
parts. Projective identification remains controversial in psychoanalytic
literature, but the elder's calling is also similar to the more accepted
description byMargaret Mahler of thematernal "symbiotic ego" function
of relieving the infant from tension. For a discussion of these issues, see
my "Validation of Psychoanalysis, and 'Projective Identification,'"
Semiotica, forthcoming.
Richard J. Rosenthal has interpreted "Raskolnikov's Destructiveness"
as projective identification, inDo IDare Disturb the Universe?: A Memor
ial to Wilfred R. Bion, ed. James S. Grotstein (Beverly Hills: Caesura,
1981), 199-235.
67


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The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

The Sons Karamazov: Dostoevsky's Characters as Freudian Transformations

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The Sons Karamazov:

Deathlike attacks, Freud writes, "signify an identification with a

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regaining interest in it. Freud's completed essay discusses The

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used it to interpret the beating-phantasies and Dostoevsky's seiz

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Karamazov sons occupy cannot be completed (either in respect to

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No father arises to set these conflicts straight: Alyosha Kara

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like the sons'. Ivan empathizes with her obtrusive, obsessive

Varvara is the novel's least developed character, and given her

What the Karamazov sons do define are some possible Oedipal

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son as he passes into adulthood (xxvi). Alyosha's basic develop

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To explicate Dostoevsky's "transformations" of this predica

The sons' effort to cope with their grievance might be represented

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The sons' varied approaches to coping with their grievance

he did not finish his course at the school, entered a

Dmitry's rashness thus prevents his replicating his father. He is

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is just such a two-sided nature, a nature that could balance himself

Early in the novel, Dmitry "secretly reproached himself for many

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The exaggerated quality of Dmitry's rage also serves as a self

"Caught him cleverly at Mokroye, didn't they?"

When he is arrested, Dmitry struggles to explain the two

"You're to an honourable man?a most honourable man,

playing dirty tricks on people like all of us, gentlemen?(542)

"I mean, like me alone, gentlemen,

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ces, he explains that he cannot judge his father because he resem

"You see, I didn't like the way he looked. There was

Dmitry's confession is bracketed by two dreams of conscience,

"that someone is chasing me?someone I'm terribly afraid of?

chasing me in the dark, at night?looking for me, and I hide

enjoy my terror to the full... [original ellipsis] That's what you're

But after he admits hoarding Katerina's money (like his father

Thus, as the magistrate, the defense attorney and Dmitry himself

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father is to maintain both sides of a conflict. This ambivalence

"he was a little chap so high, abandoned by his father in the

"That old man?why, he used to carry me in his arms,

by everybody. He was like a father tome!" (539)

Ivan and Alyosha, in contrast, were taken in by the wife of a

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expected to require greater exertions to cope with their grievances

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"Your brother Ivan is writing theological articles at present as a

Conversing with Alyosha before the murder at an inn, Ivan

"I wanted to discuss the suffering of humanity in general, but

perhaps we'd confine ourselves to the sufferings of children." (277)

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prologue becomes an indictment of an uncaring Fyodor whose

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there is a good father is expressed by Ivan's devil in his tale of the

"It is true he was weak in health, but in character, in spirit?oh, no,