The Brothers Karamazov Reading Guide #1: The Preface

The Not-Unclean One

I. Original Text

Dedicated to Anna Grigoryevna Dostoevskaya

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.

(John 12:24)

From the Author

In beginning the account of the life of my hero, Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, I feel some perplexity. For although I call Alexei Fyodorovich my hero, I know very well that he is by no means a great man. Thus I foresee that questions like the following are unavoidable:

“What is so remarkable about your Alexei Fyodorovich that you chose him as your hero? What has he accomplished? To whom is he known, and for what? Why should I, the reader, spend my time studying the facts of his life?”

The last question is the most fatal, because I can only answer it with:

“Perhaps you will see for yourself if you read the novel.”

But what if they read the novel and do not see it—if they do not agree that my Alexei Fyodorovich is remarkable? I say this because I regretfully foresee that this will be so. To me he is remarkable, but I very much doubt whether I can prove it to the reader. The fact is that he is perhaps a man of action, but of an indefinite, unsettled sort. Though it would be strange to demand clarity from people in a time such as ours.

One thing seems fairly clear: he is a strange man, even an eccentric. But strangeness and eccentricity tend to be a hindrance rather than a claim to attention, especially in a time when everyone is striving to unify the particulars and to find some common meaning in the general confusion. In most cases the eccentric is a particular and isolated thing. Is that not so?

Now if you do not agree with this last assertion and answer “not so,” or “not always,” then I might take some courage regarding the significance of my hero Alexei Fyodorovich. For an eccentric is not “always” a particular and isolated thing. On the contrary, it sometimes happens that it is precisely he who carries within himself the heart of the whole, while the rest of the people of his age have, for some passing reason, been torn away from it for a time.

I could, in fact, have dispensed with these uninteresting and vague explanations and simply begun without any preface—if it pleases you, you may read it that way. But the trouble is that while there is one biography, there are two novels. The main novel is the second, which treats my hero’s activity in our own time, at the present moment. The first novel took place thirteen years ago and is scarcely a novel at all—merely a single moment of my hero’s early youth. Yet I cannot leave out this first novel, because much of the second would become incomprehensible without it.

This complicates my original difficulty further. If I, the biographer, think that even a single novel might be excessive for so modest and indefinite a hero, then how am I to justify presenting two, and how am I to explain such presumption on my part?

Lost in trying to resolve these questions, I resolve to pass over them without any resolution at all. Of course, the perceptive reader has already guessed from the outset where I am going, and has been irritated at me for wasting empty words and precious time. To that I will answer precisely: I spent empty words and precious time, first out of courtesy, and second out of cunning—I wanted to give some warning in advance.

In fact, I am glad that my novel has divided itself into two stories while preserving “the essential unity of the whole.” Having read the first story, the reader can decide for himself whether it is worth reading the second.

Of course, no one is bound by anything; one may read two pages of the first story and shut the book for good. But there are also delicate readers who will want to read to the end in order to reach a fair judgment—all Russian critics, for instance. With such people I feel more at ease. For however careful and conscientious they may be, I have given them the most legitimate excuse to abandon the story at its first episode.

Well, that is the whole preface. I fully agree that it is superfluous, but since it is written, let it stand.

Now to the matter itself.

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II. Commentary

“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.”

On a surface reading, this is about sacrifice. That which must die in order to sprout.

Consider the following situation.

Suppose there is something unclean—say, “the act of daring, vulgarly and basely, to command another human being to submit to a value-judgment.”

And suppose there is a self that believes it alone stands outside this uncleanness. That self discovers the unclean act and points to it as unclean.

The interesting thing is that the not-unclean self, merely by pointing to the unclean thing as unclean, is thereby implicated in the very structure it was criticizing. It cannot, therefore, remain an outsider wholly unrelated to the structure it criticizes.

For the not-unclean self this would be an extremely painful thing—another word for it is “death.”

To avoid this “death,” the not-unclean self may point to the unclean thing while pretending it is doing no such thing. To protect its image of its own innocence, it may disguise a command as something other than a command.

But the innocence obtained this way is not honest innocence; a self-suspicion remains that it is a cowardly innocence, preserved by concealing one’s own involvement. One avoids “death” and takes on instead the filth of “cowardice.”

That too is painful, all the same.

Yet just as a single grain of wheat brings forth much fruit by dying, if that not-unclean self sprouts by becoming unclean, then the death may not be in vain.

The death of the grain is meaningful not because death itself is noble, but because it bears fruit. So too an author’s self-damage, or a base representation, may suffice in itself if it produces a new recognition in the reader.

Not sacrifice, not self-harm, not excretion, but “occurrence.”

(This will be taken up again later, in the death of Zosima within the work itself.)

Even if we posit a self of great insight, and even if that self has recognized something as “unclean,” the moment it points this out, that self too enters the structure of judging others, defining them, and influencing their conduct.

So this “insightful self,” assuming it instinctively does not want its own death, and further assuming it to be a self distinct from other things, will find it very difficult to devise a way of speaking about the “unclean” while remaining undamaged.

But if that self is in fact not a self distinct from other things—if there is such a thing as a “universal,” if the boundary of the self is itself faint—then descending may in fact be no change at all.

“Abiding alone as a single grain” is maintaining one’s ideal self as distinct from other things, even if that distinction is not real, while dying to bring forth much fruit is another ideal, a “universal,” and it is also, in a different way, “not-unclean.”

If we now restate “the unclean thing,” we would have to put it this way:

The unclean—or believed-to-be-unclean—thing, or the sum of a spectrum of being that is not distinguished from other things and shares a self with them.

So “death” is this:

The death of the self-image that one alone is exceptionally innocent.

Or:

The death of the illusion that one can judge the world from outside the world.

“Descent” must also be redefined.

It is not the insightful self coming down into a baser world. That self was within the world from the start, and only imagined itself to be outside. From that standpoint, it becomes a kind of acknowledgment of the truth.

And in that case, what dies is not the self but the boundary of the self.

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Let us take “the death of the illusion that one can judge the world from outside the world” as the work’s central idea and apply it to the preface.

One of the selves, Dostoevsky, asks:

Why should the reader spend his time on Alyosha?

For the “ideal self” to state that Alyosha is worth looking at does not fit the central idea. If the author sets himself up as an absolute judge standing outside the world and the work, and presents his own judgment of Alyosha’s value as a final verdict the reader must follow, that conflicts with the work’s central idea.

“I stand outside the world and the work, and I know Alyosha’s value objectively. Therefore the reader must accept my verdict.”

It is this kind of transcendent, innocent position that conflicts with the central idea.

By contrast, the following is permissible:

“I think Alyosha is remarkable. But I do not know whether I can prove it to you. I also acknowledge the possibility that you will read and not agree.”

The narrator does not preserve himself as an exceptional judge. He too comes down to the position of one who is judged. The author, too, is absorbed into the world as one self among others.

“Sometimes it is the eccentric who carries within himself the heart of the whole, and it is rather the rest of the people of his age who have been torn away from that heart.”

This is at once the content of that central idea itself, and, since it does not contradict Dostoevsky’s claim that Alyosha is “worth looking at,” the self called Dostoevsky at least defers passing the verdict that Alyosha is worthless merely on the grounds that he is not ordinary and stands apart from the many.

Very interestingly, owing to the historical fact of Dostoevsky’s death and the work’s incompleteness, that “second novel” does not exist in this world.

As a result, the “deferral of the final verdict” contained in the preface was realized to an extreme even outside the work.

Whether this was an intended form or a formal effect produced by the work’s posthumous fate cannot be known.

But, as was said earlier:

“If it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”