Charles Baxter on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Karamazov Brothers: Not Understanding
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(Guest post by Charles Baxter)
Before COVID-19 arrived on the scene, you could go into bookstores and browse. You could amble down the aisles and look for something that might snag your attention. For much of my adult life, I’ve suspected that books are not simple inanimate objects but are haunted. This may sound crazy, but bear with me. Sometimes books want you to read them. They fall out of the shelves onto the floor in front of you, offering themselves up to you. It’s like the Humane Society, except with books. This begging-behavior also used to happen to me in libraries. Once, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a novel by Aubrey Menen dropped from a shelf onto the floor, five feet away from me. Nothing and nobody had visibly pushed it there. I picked the book up, checked it out, read it, and loved it. Who is Aubrey Menen? A wonderful, forgotten writer. You could look him up.
In many bookstores now there are sections I tend to avoid. Variously called “Wisdom Literature” or “Self-Help and Wisdom,” the books in these sections have all the answers. They’re about healing and understanding and knowledge and serenity. They offer peacefulness, calm, and bliss. You’re in torment? Buy this book.
I suppose peacefulness, calm, and bliss are to be welcomed. Literature almost but not quite promises that it can advise you on how to achieve those treasured moments of peace of mind. You are in possession of these qualities? Good for you. God bless you—or has blessed you. But in one paragraph of Dostoevsky’s The Karamazov Brothers, a paragraph that I go back to over and over again, Ivan Karamazov refuses all that. When it comes to the suffering of children, he says, there is nothing to understand; there is no way to put such suffering into perspective; there is no “answer” to it; and if some global, philosophical, political, or religious explanation is offered to justify or to explain away the suffering of children, Ivan refuses it. In the chapter titled “Rebellion” (sometimes translated as “Mutiny”), Ivan disclaims all that.
“‘I understand nothing, and now,’ Ivan went on as if delirious, ‘I don’t want to understand anything. I want to stick to facts. I gave up trying to understand long ago. As soon as I feel I want to understand something I immediately have to renounce facts, whereas I have decided to stay true to facts…” (Ignat Avsey translation)
Two pages later, Ivan goes further.
“‘And if the suffering of children is required to make up the total suffering necessary to attain the truth, then I say here and now that no truth is worth such a price.
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“Besides, the price of harmony has been set too high, we can’t afford the entrance fee. And that’s why I hasten to return my entry ticket…It’s not that I don’t accept God, Aloysha; I’m just, with the utmost respect, handing Him back my ticket.’”
We are often told that Dostoevsky himself did not agree with Ivan, his fictional character, though he worried that Ivan’s arguments were so strong that they could not be answered except by faith. You can say, “Ivan’s arguments are ideas, and faith is not an idea.” But Ivan would say, might say, well, okay, but if you’re going to take suffering seriously—particularly the suffering of children—then no explanation is possible, even if that explanation turns out to be true. Ivan wants to cast his lot with unknowing, and those who suffer, “Even if I am wrong,” he says.
I don’t wish for a minute to compare myself to Dostoevsky, but my new novel, The Sun Collective, was inspired, if that’s the word, by the homeless, vagrant, penniless street people I see every day in my walks through and around the city where I live, Minneapolis. I can’t see these men and women without thinking that there’s no explanation that would justify the condition of their lives or their suffering, and my novel is partially about the inability or refusal to accept that condition, and it also concerns the lengths that some people are willing to go to repair those particular lives.
A refusal to understand can be heroic. We don’t find such refusals often in American literature—we believe in self-help, instead—but Russian literature is full of them. From Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “‘I don’t understand anything,’ said Levin, blushing and feeling that his words were foolish and that they could not help but be foolish in this situation.” (Marian Schwartz translation)
Anyway, I find such passages inspiring and beautiful. I don’t believe in the explanations or even the justifications for anyone’s suffering, children least of all.
Charles Baxter is the author of the novels The Feast of Love (nominated for the National Book Award), First Light, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play, The Soul Thief, and The Sun Collective, and the story collections Believers, Gryphon, Harmony of the World, A Relative Stranger, There’s Something I Want You to Do, and Through the Safety Net. His stories have been included in The Best American Short Stories. Baxter lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Find out more at www.charlesbaxter.com/