The Brothers Karamazov

This study will compare the characters of the brothers Dmitri and Ivan in Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov. The brothers stand in stark contrast to one another, with Dmitri being the brother who represents the passion of human existence, while ivan represents the rational aspect. Because of this contrast, the brothers inevitably clash.

Dmitri, also known as Mitya in the novel, is immediately shown to be a man who lives a wayward life of passion:

He spent an irregular boyhood and youth. . . . He did not finish his studies at the gymnasium, he got into a military school, . . . fought a duel, and was degraded, . . . led a wild life, and spent a good deal of money (6).

Dmitri is, in his critical father's eyes, "frivolous, unruly, of violent passions, impatient, and dissipated" (7). He is relatively uneducated and squanders his family inheritance. Ivan, on the other hand, is highly educated, dedicated to reason and order in his life, an analytical writer, and a dedicated atheist.

As their religiously inclined brother Alyosha thinks, "The two brothers were such a contrast in personality and character that it would be difficult to find two men more unlike" (25).

Alyosha perceives, prior to the meeting of the family with Zosima, that "Dmitri was the only one who could regard the interview seriously. . . . Ivan would come from curiosity, perhaps of the coarsest kind" (26). This perception suggests that, despite Dmitri's wayward and passion-driven personality, he

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r are rivals in love, and both have passionate characters, although Dmitri's is marked by a sincerity almost wholly lacking in Fyodor, who is manipulative and cunning. Ivan, like all the brothers, suffers from fatherly neglect, but he takes his hatred of his father out on the old man in devious ways which the other brothers would not consider and of which they are not even capable. One might further argue that Dmitri has accepted his father's passionate way as his own, but, unlike Fyodor, he wrestles with the question of virtue and wishes he were a more virtuous man in control of his feelings. Ivan, on the other hand, hating his father with every part of his being, rejects God as a means of rejecting his father. Whereas Dmitri is consumed by his passion for life to such an extent that he never truly wrestles with the existence or non-existence of God, Ivan's entire being is dedicated to the question of God's existence, and especially of God's role in, or absence from, the affairs of human beings. However, the old monk zeroes in on Ivan's dilemma, seeing beneath the surface of Ivan's apparent belief that God plays no significant role in the world. Zosima says to Ivan that Ivan has "not answered" within himself the questions of God

Category: Literature - T