In his final Christian affirmation as in his focus on man's inner nature Dostoevsky was not typical of his age. The trend had been to move away from religion, whether toward the nihilism of the Stavrogins or toward the preoccupied agnosticism of the modern world. One then found a kind of consolation in quasi-religious social ideology, whether of a radical populist or a reactionary Pan-Slav nature. Dostoevsky was too deeply affected by these trends to attempt with any confidence a full reaffirmation of traditional Christianity. His faith is rather that of a realist in search of 'the more real.' There are, perhaps, two icons for this deeply personal and precarious faith. The first is the image of the Sistine Madonna, which he always kept over his writing desk as if in defiance of Bakunin and the revolutionaries who would have thrown it on the barricades at Dresden. (Dostoevsky himself caused a minor uproar in Dresden when he defied the guards in the museum to climb onto a chair for a closer look at the painting.)33 The Madonna depicted the source of all creation, the supreme mother, with the consummate technique of European art in which his own novels are steeped. This painting was a reminder of the 'marvelous dead' that lay buried in the 'strife and logic' of post-Christian Europe and which he hoped to resurrect through the rejuvenated Christian commitment of the Russian people and the prophetic power of his own art.
The second icon of Dostoevsky's anguished faith is a picture of hands. The Brothers is filled with hands and feet. They are the implements for doing things in this world, symbols of the 'harsh and terrible thing' of love in action as opposed to love in dreams. 'What have I come for?' asks Katya rhetorically in the last scene with Dmitry, 'to embrace your feet, to press your hands like this, till it hurts.' Hands have been a symbol of laceration throughout the novel. In the fable of the onion we are told of a peasant woman who lost her last chance for salvation from the fiery lake of hell by trying to beat off the hands of others who sought to grasp the onion
which the peasant woman once gave in charity and which God in his compassion had extended to her. The hands of innocent children beckon Ivan to rebellion against God, He tells Alyosha about the murderer who held out a pistol to a baby and waited to blow its brains out until the precise moment that the baby extended its little, trusting hand to touch it. Then he is driven to insanity by the image of a five-year-old girl tortured by her parents and left in an outhouse with her face smeared in excrement by a sadistic mother who sleeps calmly in the warm house while the little girl prays without any resentment to 'dear kind God' and 'beats her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and cold.' Ivan rebels against God because of the need to avenge the tears of the little girl; and even Alyosha admits that he would be unwilling to accept any ideal harmony that tolerated the sight of 'that baby beating its breast with its fist.' Yet Dmitry is led to accept his fate by the dream in which 'a little babe cried and cried, and held out its little fists blue from cold.'
The final message of redemption occurs at the end of the story of 'the boys,' which is also the end of the novel. Just before, we are given a last pathetic image of the suffering of Iliusha's bereaved father. Last seen sobbing incoherently by his dying son 'with his fists pressed against his head,' he returns to dominate the early part of the funeral scene. He is all hands: grasping at the flowers from the bier, embracing the coffin, crumbling the bread and throwing it in the grave. In a masterly inversion of the scene in which Dmitry is forced to take off his boots and expose his ugly feet in court, Dostoevsky leaves Iliusha's father kissing the boots of his buried boy and asking, 'Iliusha, dear little man, where are thy little feet?'
When they leave the old man's room and go back into the open air, the boys are suddenly impelled to sound a final joyful chorus. There was a hint of it in the mysterious metamorphosis of Iliusha's dog 'Beetle' (Zhuchka), whom Iliusha had tortured and driven away (in a way prescribed by Smerdiakov) into Kolya's dog, 'Ringing of Bells' (Perezvori), who turned the last visit of the boys to Iliusha almost into a time of joy. The ringing of church bells provides the transition from Katya's scene with Dmitry to the funeral of Iliusha. But the sound of bells soon gives way to one last 'Ode to Joy.' It is almost as if the choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which Bakunin had exempted from destruction by revolutionaries, were suddenly being acted out; as if each 'beautiful daughter of the divine spark' (as Bakunin used to address his anarchistic followers) had suddenly reached the moment in the Schiller-Beethoven text when 'all men shall be brothers' and the 'aesthetic education of mankind' shall be completed by the realization that 'above the vault of stars there must live a loving father.'34
In this joyous final moment of The Brothers the image is again that of hands. They are not joined in prayer as Durer would have them or making the sign of the cross in the manner of either the Orthodox or the Old Believers. Least of all is the image one of hands raised to salute Caesar or register votes in some parliamentary body. Rather it is the picture of the hands of children joined near a grave in an unexpected moment of warmth which overcomes all sense of schism and separation, even between this world and the next. A shared newness of life has mysteriously come out of the death of their little comrade. 'Let us be going,' says Alyosha. 'For now we go hand in hand.' 'Forever so, hand in hand through all of life!' echoes Kolya 'rapturously.'
The image of reconciliation is profoundly Christian. It is very different from the late Ibsen's pagan picture of hands joylessly joined by shadow people on an icy mountaintop over the dead body of John Gabriel Borkman. Yet Dostoevsky's novel ends not with the traditional heavenly hallelujah but with an earthly cry of joy. As they go off hand in hand to enjoy the funeral banquet and life thereafter, Kolya calls out, and the boys echo, one of the last and best hurrahs in modern literature: 'Hurrah for Karamazov!'
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3- New Perspectives of the Waning Century
1 he early months of 1881 brought the death of Musorgsky and Dostoev-sky and the end of the populist period in the history of Russian culture. It seems strangely appropriate that Surikov's 'Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy,' one of the 'wanderers'' most famous historical canvases, was first exhibited in St. Petersburg on March I, 1881, the very day of Alexander II's assassination.1 This murder precipitated a program of execution and purge that was as decisive, if not quite as bloody, as that to which Surikov's canvas alluded. The wave of reaction and repression that followed the death of the 'tsar-liberator' did not recede significantly until the revolutionary crisis of 1905, nearly a quarter of a century later.
The artists of the populist age had combined remorseless realism with a compulsive conviction that 'the people' contained in some way the hidden key to the regeneration of Russian society. Artists and agitators alike- many of whom had been educated in seminaries-frequently subscribed to the vague but passionate belief that some new, primarily ethical form of Christianity was about to be realized on Russian soil. It was not uncommon for 'liberty, equality, and fraternity' to be written on crosses; or for radicals to affirm their belief in 'Christ, St. Paul, and Chernyshevsky.' The ideal of a new Christian form of society drew strength from the indigenous schismatic and sectarian traditions, from the Comtian idea of a religion of humanity, from the quasi-religious socialism of Proudhon, and even from official insistence that Christian Russia had a unique spiritual heritage to defend against the heathen Turks and the corrupt West.
It is hard to recapture the great sense of expectation that pervaded the atmosphere of Alexander's last years. There was a general feeling that dramatic changes were inevitable precisely because of Russia's increasing importance in the world and the need to be worthy of its calling. Dostoev-sky's famous speech in Moscow on June 8, 1880, extolling Pushkin as a
uniquely Russian prophet of universal reconciliation, was the scene of a public demonstration typical of the age. For half an hour he was cheered as scores of people wept, and he was publicly embraced by everyone from the old Slavophile Aksakov to the old Westernizer (and his long-time antagonist) Turgenev. Voices in the crowd called out 'prophet' just as they had burst forth in the court scenes of the late seventies to call out their approval for the pleas of political prisoners to fight 'in the name of Christ' for 'the humiliated and the weak.' The raised section in which the accused sat was referred to as Golgotha, and the revolutionaries frequently spoke of themselves as 'true Christians' or a 'Christian brotherhood.' Even the most positivistic of populists, Mikhailovsky and Lavrov, claimed
