• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 5659 0

landowner. He has had three sons by two young wives, both now dead, but has all but abandoned them. In a way reminiscent of a folk tale, two sons are negative, in opposing respects, the third positive. Dmitri is like his father, a physically strong, drunken bully. Ivan has gone to the opposite masculine extreme, by retreating into the mind, cut off from feeling and reality by his over-dependence on the intellect. The third son, Alyosha, selfless, loving and devout, lives in a monastery with his spiritual mentor Father Zossima (who eventually dies). There is also a shadowy fourth son, Smerdyakov, born from a short-lived illicit affair between old Karamazov and `stinking Lizaveta, a sad social outcast. From their tortured relationships with their father, it seems that both Dmitri and Ivan might well be tempted to kill the old monster, and when the murder actually takes place, Ivan is at least partly complicit to what has happened (although, as a good intellectual, he has been careful to distance himself from the nasty physical realities of the crime). But it is Dmitri who behaves most suspiciously, and who is therefore arrested and put on trial. Even though the court is presented with evidence that the true murderer was Smerdyakov, the most shadowed son of all, rejected and mentally unstable, this is dismissed, because Smerdyakov had then committed suicide. Dmitri is thus wrongly found guilty. The son who had not been strong enough to prevent any of this happening is Alyosha, the story's hero. But now that his Dark Father is dead, he can set off on the road to Self-realisation by following in the footsteps of his `fight Father-figure, Zossima. At the end of the story, to confirm this image of the Self at last emerging from all the surrounding darkness we also see the condemned but innocent Dmitri, purified by his sufferings, preparing to escape to start a new life in America.

1. In a literal sense, of course, it is impossible to believe that Oedipus would not have told Jocasta the story of his life long before, just as it is impossible that he would not have learned the circumstances of Laius's death. But such anomalies are incidental to the deeper drama.

2. It has been observed how simply watching this play, showing a man having to face up to his own guilt, can in some spectators evoke a long-repressed sense of guilt about their own lives. I recall how, during a particularly powerful production of the play at Stratford-on-Avon in the 1950s, a good many people in the audience, as the Tragedy moved towards its climax, could evidently take no more and stole out of the theatre. Although these people had not literally killed their fathers and married their mothers, the more general sense of unease the play aroused in them became too much to bear.

3. It was this pattern of course which, from his rather narrow perspective, Freud intuitively seized on to provide the basis for his theory of the `Oedipus complex': the idea that the fundamental psychological problem afflicting many men lies in their inability to resolve their relationship with their mother, leaving them prey to an unconscious `death wish' against their father. What he had recognised, correctly but without full understanding, was that, in the pattern of human development, a man who has not fully realised his masculinity remains frozen under the spell of the `Dark Mother'. He thus remains in some way a 'mother's boy, in conflict with the values of `Father' which represent the masculinity he is unable to develop. This in turn renders him unable properly to develop his anima, his own `inner feminine. What Freud failed to recognise was the law of the `unrealised value, by which the figure of the `Dark Father' represents a negative version of that which the hero needs to make positive in himself in order to succeed, by achieving the full masculine-feminine balance which will allow him to become a Tight Father'.

1. Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology (London, 1959), p. 466.

2. Since the `Big Bang' theory first took shape between the 1920s and the 1950s, various modifications