Spare a Thought for Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov
Note: The following has only minimal spoilers of The Brothers Karamazov*. It describes a scene from the first 100 pages of the book.*
There are not enough books about being a shitty and annoying person. Not misunderstood or unlucky but actually the worst—the kind of insecure soul always overflowing with attempts to justify itself. Arrogant but fragile, too self-involved to listen, too desperate to shut up: in The Brothers Karamazov, such a character is called a buffoon.
In 1846, Fyodor Dostoevsky met success after the publication of his first novel Poor Folk. He was 25 and lonely, according to his biographer Joseph Frank, having “lived a solitary life lacking any true intimacy” with few exceptions.[1] But while he was eager to join the Belinsky Pléiade, the literary circle that had championed his book, he alienated them with pride over his rapid success:
All the evidence agrees that Dostoevsky’s behavior with the Pléiade would have caused difficulties with a group of saints…the result, only to be expected, was that they turned on Dostoevsky after a certain point and made him the butt of a veritable campaign of persecution.
He broke with the Pléiade within a year, his reputation destroyed. In a letter to his brother the next year, he reflected on his social incompetence:
I have such an awful, repulsive character…sometimes, when my heart is full of love, you can’t get a kind word out of me. My nerves don’t obey me at such moments. I am ridiculous and disgusting.
And then in 1849 he was sent to Siberia. On exaggerated charges of political radicalism Dostoevsky endured a mock-execution, four years of hard labor, and another six years of military service. Yet a decade of exile did not erase his earlier humiliation: many of Dostoevsky’s later characters resemble his 1846 self. There is the Underground Man, whose bitterness is as social as it is philosophical. There is Arkady of The Adolescent, embarrassing himself at parties and cherishing the idea of complete independence. And then there is Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, whom Dostoevsky named after himself.
Fyodor Pavlovich is as vile a character as Dostoevsky ever wrote. In addition to beating his wife and abandoning his sons, he is strongly implied to have raped and impregnated a mentally disabled woman. “Can he be allowed to go on dishonoring the earth with himself?”, his son Dmitri Fyodorovich asks.[2] He is also irritating, ruining every conversation with crude jokes and insults. As a reader it’s hard to generate much sympathy for him.
But it’s a worthwhile exercise to try. The Brothers Karamazov is a common favorite book and a common re-read; “everything there [is] to know about life [is] in The Brothers Karamazov,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote. I have been re-reading it every few years since high school, and it’s central to how I think about myself and other people. Why the obsession? I’m convinced that part of Dostoevsky’s appeal is his sympathy for the shameful, the embarrassing, the unlikeable—compare Tolstoy, who writes for and about hot people. Fyodor Pavlovich, as an extreme case, is a study in what makes Dostoevsky great.
We meet Fyodor Pavlovich during an audience with his sons and the Elder Zosima, a monk famous for his humility. The Elder tries to extend Fyodor Pavlovich compassion, but Karamazov cannot accept. Like the younger Dostoevsky, he is overwhelmed by desperation for approval and the conviction that he is not worthy of it. He resorts to malicious jesting, an expression of contempt for the Elder and a challenge: can you forgive even this? In his very first words to the Elder, Fyodor Pavlovich knows exactly who he is: “Your reverence… you see before you a buffoon! … Thus I introduce myself!”
Fyodor Pavlovich tests the Elder with escalating irreverence while the Elder tries to break through with kindness. He recounts a bawdy joke he once told and then makes up a story about the religious conversion of a famous philosopher. When another member of the party calls him out, the Elder tells Karamazov, “Do not worry, I beg you. I ask you especially to be my guest…and above all, do not be so ashamed of yourself, for that is the cause of everything.” Fyodor Pavlovich is touched:
That is exactly how it all seems to me, when I walk into a room, that I’m lower than anyone else, and that everyone takes me for a buffoon, so ‘Why not, indeed, play the buffoon’... I’m a buffoon out of shame, great elder, out of shame.
He promises to stop clowning: “I’ve been acting on purpose in order to test you… and now, I am silent, from here on I’ll be silent.”
But one cannot be cured of one’s personality in a single moment. “I’ll be silent”—how many times have I made this exact resolution! Watching his sons speak to the Elder, he cannot resist raising his grievance against Dmitri Fyodorovich. The scene reaches a new low as father and son accuse each other of sexual immorality and describe their competition for the same woman. Fyodor Pavlovich challenges his son to a duel, Dmitri Fyodorovich implies that his father has no right to be alive, and Fyodor Pavlovich begins to leave in disgrace. The Elder’s parting shot is an attempt to absorb his shame: “‘Forgive me! Forgive me, all of you!’ he said, bowing on all sides to his guests.” But on his way out of the monastery, Fyodor Pavlovich’s bitterness asserts itself again:
He suddenly remembered being asked once before, at some point: “Why do you hate so-and-so so much?” And he had replied then, in a fit of his buffoonish impudence: “I’ll tell you why: he never did anything to me, it’s true, but I once did him a most shameless and nasty turn, and the moment I did it, I immediately hated him for it.”
He runs back to the monastery. The Elder Zosima has left, so Fyodor Pavlovich rants at the other monks. He can’t accept their grace, he has to have the last word.
Fyodor Pavlovich suffers from a desire for human connection gone malignant, an extrapolation of the younger author’s shame. I get it: it’s unbearable to feel inadequate, much better to feel superior. Lash out against the thing you want the most? You wouldn’t have gotten it anyway. This self-sabotage is vintage Dostoevsky, psychologist of the contradictory, the twisted. A need for acceptance that recoils into bitterness, infatuation with someone because they insulted you, the ecstasy of ruining your own life_—_that’s his palette of colors. He does not limit himself to sympathetic kinds of failing.
I love it for the obvious reason: not all of my failings are sympathetic. Neither were Dostoevsky’s. What about yours?