The Russian Hero

The Augustinian Conversion of Fallen Man’s Cor as the Development of the Russian Hero: The Idiot’s Myshkin and The Brothers Karamazov’s Alyosha

In his author’s note to The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky comments on the nature of a hero:

For not only is an eccentric ‘not always’ a particularity and a separate element, but, on the contrary, it happens sometimes that such a person, I dare say, carries within himself the very heart of the whole, and the rest of the men of his epoch have for some reason been temporarily torn from it, as if by a gust of wind…

Although this comment is specifically about Alyosha Karamazov, it could pertain to the character of the Russian hero in modernity. The Russian hero is a unique person but perhaps does not want to be unique – he just wants to fit in somewhere in his society and be left alone. In other words, he wants to be just like every one else. But there is a restlessness within himself, in his heart, which keeps him somewhat apart from the society in which he desires to belong. It is this restlessness which says, “Something is horribly wrong with my people, and what can I do to help?” This restlessness is the call to be a hero to his people, even though he finds himself in the ridiculous situation that he feels alienated to the very people that he must save. The “men of his epoch have for some reason been… torn” from the original state of wholeness such that they have forgotten that something is horribly wrong.

In listening and submitting to this call, the Russian hero rejects the easy life of trying to fit in the status quo, which includes keeping himself to himself. Thus he moves beyond himself into the community of his people in order to guide it to the original, forgotten vision of wholeness. For Dostoevsky, this vision of wholeness is, as he states in his December 11, 1868 letter to Maykov, “Christ and the Russian earth, the Russian Christ and the Russian God” (BK 751). In making this vocation of the Russian hero a call to be a Christian hero, Dostoevsky points to Christ as an exemplar of the peculiar nature of the Russian hero. Dostoevsky even quotes John 12:24 as the epigram to The Brothers Karamazov: “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.” The Russian hero’s own solipsistic loves must die in order to save himself and his people; he must submit himself to the call to be a hero. If not, he and his people remain lost, torn from their original state and buffeted by their fallen state, “as if by a gust of wind.”[2] But one’s own solipsistic loves are strong obstacles and must be turned towards God, and the best example of such a conversion of human loves in the would-be Christian hero is St. Augustine, as seen in his Confessions.

Nothing in Augustine’s early background indicates that he would become a great Christian bishop and leader of the relatively young Christian Church. Born of a Christian mother and pagan father, he was raised to be successful in the secular world of a Roman citizen and teacher of rhetoric, “that I should learn how to make a good speech and how to persuade others by my words” (44). In fact, Augustine faults his secular education for improperly educating his cor, that is, his desire for friendship, his desire for erotic love, and his desire for wisdom. He says, “This traditional education taught me that Jupiter punishes the wicked with his thunderbolts and yet commits adultery himself” (36). His cor is ungrounded, and without a solid foundation in God, his cor, ironically enough, becomes mired in Augustine’s own self; “I cared for nothing but to love and be loved” (43) such that “[w]ithout you I am my guide to the brink of perdition” (71).

So, instead of friendship for the sake of God’s love, Augustine has friends for “the thrill of having partners in sin” (52), when he steals the pears from the pear tree. Also, “I was led astray myself and led others astray in my turn” (71). His parents, meanwhile, “were unduly eager for me to learn, my father because he gave next to no thought to you and only shallow thought to me, and my mother because she thought that the usual course of study would certainly not hinder me” (47). Instead of erotic love for the sake of mirroring the marriage of God and his people, Augustine tries to sate his own lust, “floundering in the broiling sea of my fornication” (43) and in “a mistress whom I had chosen for no special reason but that my restless passions had alighted on her” (72). Far from beholding his beloved, this woman becomes a means of sating himself. Finally, instead of submitting his love of wisdom to the faith of his mother, Augustine takes on the false fantasy of Manichean mythology “because the voice of my own error called me away from [Christ] and I was dragged down and down by the weight of my own pride” (87). In other words, “I preferred to think that you too were changeable rather than suppose that I was not what you are” (86).

The key to the conversion of Augustine’s cor lies in the very restlessness of his cor: “you made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you” (21). Through the mediation of others, God will force Augustine to listen to His speech and not the speech of Augustine’s choosing. Ironically, the mediation of others will force Augustine to listen to God resident in his own cor, via memory, for the very first time. In regards to friendship, two notable examples come to mind. The first is Augustine’s friend who died; but just before he died, the friend was baptized and said to the mocking Augustine that “ if I wished to be his friend, I must never speak to him like that again” (76). The second is Augustine’s own mother, whose lamentations and prayers Augustine later realizes are actually from God (46). In regards to erotic love, Augustine finds that he cannot love women without feeling unfaithful to his love of God: “I was listless, exhausted by the canker of anxiety, because there were other reasons too why I found it irksome to be forced to adapt myself to living with a wife” (158). For Augustine, the only mediator is Christ Himself, as revealed in Scripture, as he reads Romans 13:13 in the garden in Milan (178). It is only then does Augustine begin to see himself as “Continence herself, not barren but a fruitful mother of children, of joys born of you, O Lord, her Spouse” (176). In other words, Augustine’s role reverses, from being human Lover of self to human Beloved of God.

But the most important conversion of his cor is his love of wisdom. The main obstacle of reforming this part of his cor is Augustine’s narrow imagination such that Manicheanism can ensnare it. Ironically, it is only turning to the mediation of the pagans – the Cicero (59) and the Platonists (144) – which remind Augustine of his faculty for reason, does Augustine see that Manicheanism has no validity, no foundation, in either speculative philosophy nor personal, communal experience. In realizing that reason and imagination are not antithetical, Augustine’s imagination widens such that it is able to hear what the Christian imagination speaks of: of God speaking through his Creation, though other people, through Scripture -- as explained by Ambrose (107), and finally through his own memory. For “memory, realizing that something was missing and feeling crippled by the loss of something to which it had grown accustomed, kept demanding that the missing part should be restored” (225). The whole of Augustine’s experiences, including that restless cor which was actually searching for God, is in the memory, and, surprisingly, God, as Incarnation, is in Augustine’s memory, too:

See how I have explored the vast field of my memory in search of you, O Lord! And I have not found you outside it. For I have discovered nothing about you except what I have remembered since the time when I first learned about you. Ever since then I have not forgotten you. For I found my God, who is Truth itself, where I found truth, and ever since I learned the truth I have not forgotten it. So, since the time when I first learned of you, you have always been present in my memory, and it is there that I find you whenever I am reminded of you and find delight in you. This is my holy joy, which in your mercy you have given me, heedful of my poverty. (230)

Thus, finally hearing God’s speech, Augustine’s own memory and imagination become enlightened such that he can speak on behalf of God, of which the Confessions itself is a prime example. His fallen cor turned back towards God, Augustine is no longer a restless wanderer who leads others to destruction but a mediating light for others, a guiding Christian hero who would become the Bishop of Hippo and defender of his living Church.

Richard Curle best represents those readers of The Idiot who see the world in stark black and white with very little, if any, shades of grey. Says Curle, “Dostoevsky… was able to breathe into his ideal, Myshkin, an invincibility which keeps him… spiritually untouched by the contamination around him” (70). Likening Myshkin to the Christ figure in Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor allegory in The Brothers Karamazov (70), Curle further believes that Dostoevsky “imbued him [Myshkin] with a spiritual granduer in humility, a clarity if vision which sees into recesses of motive without condemning, a simplicity at once disarming and disconcerting. And coursing through it all, giving life and meaning to it all, is the vital stream of his personality” (71). Curle is correct that Myshkin is like Ivan’s Christ but his conclusion in making such a comparison is incorrect. Ivan’s Christ is not the Christ of the Gospels. Missing is the man who angrily cleared the moneylenders in the temple, who chided his disciples for laziness and doubt, who doubted God while suffering on the cross, and who died a disgraceful and public death while taking upon his head the sins of all humanity. In his place is a beautiful, gentle miracle-worker who is neither passionate nor judgmental. Unlike the true Christ, Ivan’s Christ does not obey the dictate of his Father and suffer but obeys the human dictate of the Grand Inquisitor and leaves. Like Ivan’s Christ, Myshkin is kind, meek, virtuous, the center of attention, and absolutely ineffective.

If Myshkin is a Christ-figure, then, like Ivan’s Christ, he is a false Christ figure. As Michael Holquist points out, Myshkin is a “Christ whose appearance did not unseat the realities that had previously shaped history” (128), or, better yet, “Myshkin is a failed double… a parody of Christ” (132). In mentioning the term “double” one is reminded of Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of Dostoevsky’s other novel, The Double; in that analysis, Bakhtin declares that the “novel tells the story of Golyadkin’s desire to do without the other’s consciousness, to do without recognition by another, his desire to avoid the other and assert his own self, and what resulted from this” (24). One can apply this solipsistic desire to Myshkin’s sensibility: “Sometimes he longed to get away, to vanish from here altogether. He would have been positively glad to be in some gloomy, deserted place, only that he might be alone with his thoughts and no one might know where he was” (Idiot 336). As Holquist further states, “Myshkin, then, as idiot, stands in for the isolated individual. In other words, he is alone, a would-be Christ figure who is denied the systematic time of Heilsgeschichte, a messiah who is a layman” (134).

Myshkin, unlike Christ, has no experiential memory because of his epilepsy. “I lost my memory, and though my brain worked, the logical sequence of ideas seemed broken” (52). With no real memory, Myshkin has no real connection to his cor. If, as Augustine says, God speaks in man’s memory such that one becomes attentive to the restlessness in one’s cor, then Myshkin, having no memory, cannot hear his cor. As Myshkin says to General Epanchin, “It’s more than four years since I was in Russia, and I left in such a state – almost out of my mind. I knew nothing then and less than ever now” (23). As mentioned earlier, the Augustinian cor is tri-partite: love of friendship (including family), love of eros, and love of wisdom. The conversion of man’s fallen cor towards the Incarnate God is the necessary step towards the development of the Christian (and, for Dostoevsky, Russian) hero. But Myshkin is lacking an awareness of his cor because of his lack of familial foundation (which is the foundation for true friendship, or sobornost), his lack of eros, and his lack of wisdom, understood as grounded in the world.

While Augustine faults his secular education for his erring cor, Myshkin’s position is much worse because he has no education, properly speaking, to connect him with the world in which he lives. In regards to his family, Myshkin has none, except for his distant relative, Mme. Epanchin, whom he meets too late (51), and in fact a Swiss doctor overlooks his upbringing in an isolated Swiss town such that he never learns what it means to be Russian (53). In regards to eros, he cannot feel love. For instance, Myshkin is very clear that he only pities the poor Swiss girl Marie (64, 68); in fact, Myshkin is so disconnected to Marie’s feelings that her swift death surprises him: “I had expected her to last much longer” (69). It is Rogozhin, Myshkin’s dark double, who diagnoses Myshkin’s substitution of pity for eros: “One might almost believe that your pity us greater than my love” (206). For Myshkin, erotic, passionate love is “a monstrous thing” (351), even as he is rushing about for Aglaia and Nastasya. As Yevgeny Pavlovitch puts it, “Do you know what, my prince, the most likely thing is that you’ve never loved either of them!” (567). Even Curle wonders, “[W]as he ever in love with her [Aglaia] as a normal man is in love with a woman?” (79). Separated from familial and erotic loves, which could produce a man with a solid foot on the earth and with the people who live on this earth, even the love of wisdom becomes reduced to an external gullibility and naivete and an internal flight to airy abstraction: “Sometimes he longed to get away, to vanish from here altogether” (336). Not surprisingly, Myshkin is ill prepared to deal with Nastasya, a woman suffering from the ills of this earth. Were he a stronger, less “angelic” man, Myshkin could redeem Nastasya by acknowledging her sin (her passivity in Totsky’s seduction), by accepting it as his own (in an act of sobornost), and, through suffering together, arrive at forgiveness. But this is something that Myshkin, the bewildered idiot child with his “innate inexperience” (563), cannot do; and instead of the marriage between Myshkin and Nastasya, one has the derangement of the groom and the death of the bride. Instead of being the mediating light for others, Myshkin is the harbinger of death and destruction. Even Curle admits, “Myshkin, real as he was, is not for this world and must inevitably bring disaster when he sought to bring peace and find death where he sought to find life” (85).

As Curle overestimates Myshkin as a hero, he also underestimates Alyosha: “though Myshkin is one of the most vividly and vitally portrayed of all Dostoevsky’s characters, Alyosha is, by comparison, pale and sketchy” (205). Perhaps Curle comes to this conclusion because Alyosha, in comparison to Myshkin, does not seem central to the story and, thus, does not become as buffeted by the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (so to speak). But, oddly enough, Curle deems Alyosha’s particular strength as a real hero as not credible (210) and his love as too “anemic” (209). One wonders if Curle’s opinion of Myshkin has blinded him to Alyosha’s true nature, as a young man discovering his call to be a mediator of God’s light upon his earth, especially as seen in his work with Kolya, Ilyusha, and the other boys. While R. P. Blackmur paints Alyosha as “the young Scout Master or the Camp Counsellour or the social service worker among the underprivileged or the potentially delinquent boys” (872), one wonders if a Scout Master would suffer being stoned (BK 161), having his finger bit (163), and then asking Ilyusha, “How have I wronged you, tell me?” (164).

Unlike Myshkin, Alyosha has a cor, a love of family and friends, a love of eros, and a love of wisdom, such that all of these parts of his cor are enmeshed within each other like the trinitarian God under whom he submits. As Konstantin Mochulsky puts it, “Man’s heart is the mystical center of the universe, threads from all the world join together in it and the new Adam, reestablished in his original glory, ‘weeping, sobbing, and shedding tears,’ kisses the earth, the holy Mother, whom once before he had profaned by his fall from grace” (793). Alyosha, in imitation of Christ, is like a new Adam: He loves his family, especially his dead mother, whom “he remembered… all his life – her face, her caresses, ‘as though she stood living before me’” (BK 13). He loves his Elder, Fr. Zosima, who becomes a spiritual father to him and “to whom he became attached with all the warm first love of his insatiable heart” (13). His love for Lisa is evident early in the novel, as he blushes and is “drawn by the same irresistible force” of Lisa’s stare (50). As Alyosha tells his brother Dmitri, the sensualist of the Karamazov brothers, “I am the same as you are” (98). Similarly, his love for wisdom is embodied in Fr. Zosima: “Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God” (43) and “active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science” (49). It through this wisdom that Fr. Zosima tells Alyosha to be near his brothers (68) and to leave the monastery after his death:

“This is not your place for the time. I bless you for a great service in the world. Yours will be a long pilgrimage. And you will have to take a wife, too, you will have to. …Christ is with you. Do not abandon Him and He will not abandon you. You will see great sorrow, and in that sorrow you will be happy. This is my last message to you: in sorrow seek happiness.” (67)

As Valentina Vetlovskaya points out, the “elder… sends Alyosha back not only to his father and brothers… but also to his [future]… bride” (216). In understanding Alyosha’s heart such that he can show the love of family, woman, and wisdom within the light of God’s love, Fr. Zosima gives a lasting education of Alyosha’s cor before his death. To use Augustine’s life, it is as if Monica has seared the love of God early in Augustine’s life, Augustine has met the woman (who may not become his mistress but instead may become his wife) while they were both children, and Ambrose has been his teacher and spiritual father throughout his young adult years. Such has been the education of Alyosha’s cor such that when his last solipsistic love – his passionate love for Fr. Zosima – must die, Alyosha’s cor, although buffeted by Alyosha’s doubt of God’s justice in light of Fr. Zosima’s bodily corruption and by a visit to Grushenka in order to commit sin, can still remain mostly turned towards God. States Mochulsky,

These questions about “justice,” about Providence, about world evil, which Alyosha experiences so tragically, are Ivan’s questions. At this fatal moment the novice suddenly feels his spiritual proximity to his brother, the atheist. ….But Ivan’s “revolt” ends in his struggle with God and negation of God’s world; Alyosha’s “revolt” is completed by his mystical vision of the resurrection; he is saved by a feat of personal love. ….For Alyosha, Grushenka’s pity was the “onion.” Alyosha’s compassion proved also to be an “onion” for her wronged heart. …. “All men are guilty for everyone.” (791-92)

Instead of sin, Alyosha finds pity from a fellow sinner “and a light seemed to dawn in his face” (BK 329). This is not Nietzschean resentiment, of the condescending compassion of a superior over an inferior, but the Christian empathy and forgiveness of a sinner with his fellow sinner. “I’ve found a true sister,” Alyosha says (329), and in the vision of Cana, in which he sees Fr. Zosima and Christ with sinners, Alyosha comes to understand that his cor – through Christ’s cor -- is larger than he thought. Seeing the unity of stars with earth, Alyosha falls down to the earth, letting the last of his solipsism die as he longs “to forgive everyone and for everything, and to beg for forgiveness” (340). This is Alyosha’s garden in Milan, a stage in spiritual development to which Myshkin, in his inability to see his and other’s sins as sins in order to forgive and ask for forgiveness, cannot arrive.

Thus, Alyosha, remembering those mediators of God in his life – his mother, Fr. Zosima, even Grushenka, and others – arrive at God in his soul in the vision of Cana, and that vision also lives in his memory. Robert Belknap states that “Dostoevsky is conditioning his reader to connect memory with love, attention, and family, while forgetting is connected with neglect and debauchery” (235). In remembering those mediators in his past life, especially those who died, like his mother and his spiritual father, Alyosha carries on the light once carried by these people. As Belknap further points out, “the memory of Markel, the figure of Zosima appearing in a dream after death, and Alyosha’s ability to help Ilyusha, Kolya, and the boys, all are examples of the persistence and indeed the enhanced contagiousness of good beyond its apparent death” (241). Alyosha “had fallen on the earth a weak youth, but he rose up a resolute champion, and he knew and felt it suddenly at the very moment of his ecstasy. ….Within three days he left the monastery in accordance with the words of his elder, who had bidden him to ‘sojourn in the world’” (341). Alyosha is now the Christian hero of his people, albeit a young one. Christ founded Christianity, Augustine became Bishop of Hippo, and Alyosha, at Ilyusha’s rock, founds a community upon whose members a renewed Russia may form. States Belknap, “This formula [dying brings much fruit] begins with Alyosha’s insemination with grace, and it ends with his effort to implant a memory in the boys in his funeral oration” (241).

In other words, just as mediators of God have converted his cor, which Alyosha will always remember, Alyosha strives to be a mediator of God in kind to his young community, to educate their young cor so that they may remember and become spiritually strong in the world in order that they may, someday, become leaders and mediators for others, to become heroes. Says Alyosha,

“You must remember that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometimes be the means of saving us. ….Let us be, first and above all, kind, then honest and then let us never forget each other! I say that again. I give you my word for my part that I’ll never forget one of you. ….I have a place in my heart for you all, and I beg you to keep a place in your hearts for me! ….Let us never forget him [Ilyusha]. May his memory live forever in our hearts from this time forth! ….Ah, children, ah, dear friends, don’t be afraid of life! How good life is when one does something good and just! ….Certainly we shall all rise again, certainly we shall see each other and shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that has happened!” (734-35)

Through this long excerpt from Alyosha’s speech at Ilyusha’s stone, one sees the education of the future Christian heroes here: Experiencing the conversion of one’s cor towards the love of God and others, the youth carries the memory of this experience. But the memory does not stay hidden in one’s heart but becomes incarnate in the world as deeds “good and just”. Also, the memory does not die but lives in others they may guide (just as Ilyusha lives in their memory) and in their own memories, when they come together again in the resurrection and “tell each other… all that has happened”. Thus, the continuity of love exists not only among the living, “offering immortality on earth” as Belknap suggests (242), but also among the eternally living, the resurrected dead. As Alyosha sees in his vision of Cana, even the living and the dead are one in the love of God.

Augustine’s own conversion towards God of his fallen, solipsistic cor in order that he may develop into the Christian hero forms an underlying pattern of understanding the development of the Russian hero in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. In listening and submitting to this call, the Russian hero rejects the easy life of trying to fit in the status quo, which includes keeping himself to himself, and he moves beyond himself into the community of his people in order to guide it to the original, forgotten vision of wholeness. As mentioned previously, this vision of wholeness is for Dostoevsky, “Christ and the Russian earth, the Russian Christ and the Russian God” (BK 751). In making this vocation of the Russian hero a call to be a Christian hero, Dostoevsky points to Christ as an exemplar of the peculiar nature of the Russian hero. Like Christ, something must die in the Russian hero in order to save himself and his people. “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.” Myshkin could not die for this vocation, but Alyosha could, and therein lies the difference.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Ed. Ralph E. Matlaw. New York: Norton, 1976.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot. Trans. Constance Garnett. New York: Bantam, 1981.

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. "The Dismantled Consciousness: An Analysis of The Double." Dostoevsky: New Perspectives. Ed. Robert Louis Jackson. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984. 19-34.

Belknap, Robert L. "Memory in The Brothers Karamazov." Dostoevsky: New Perspectives. Ed. Robert Louis Jackson. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984. 227-42.

Blackmur, R. P. "The Brothers Karamazov: The Peasants Stand Firm and the Tragedy of the Saint." The Brothers Karamazov. By Fyodor Dostoevsky. Trans. Constance Garnett. Ed. Ralph E. Matlaw. New York: Norton, 1976.

Curle, Richard. Characters of Dostoevsky: Studies from Four Novels. 1950. New York: Russell & Russell, 1966.

Holquist, Michael. "The Gaps in Christology: The Idiot." Dostoevsky: New Perspectives. Ed. Robert Louis Jackson. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984. 126-44.

Mochulsky, Konstantin. “The Brothers Karamazov.” The Brothers Karamazov. Ed. Ralph E. Matlaw. New York: Norton, 1976. 776-93.

Vetlovskaya, Valentina A. "Alyosha Karamazov and the Hagiographic Hero." Dostoevsky: New Perspectives. Ed. Robert Louis Jackson. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984. 206-26.

[1] BK designates The Brothers Karamazov as edited by Ralph E. Matlaw.

[2] One is reminded of Francesca and Paolo, buffeted by the winds of their lust in Dante’s Divine Comedy.