Dmitrii Karamazov
Readers of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov assume that old man Karamazov was killed by his illegitimate son Smerdiakov. But Dmitrii (Mitya) Karamazov is unjustly accused of the crime instead. There is a long investigation, and the authorities decide to try Dmitrii. At first he is rebellious, but then, as he is about to be led away to prison, he makes an abject speech in which he welcomes his sad sud’ba:
I understand now that such men as I need a blow, a blow of destiny [udar sud’by] to catch them as with a noose, and bind them by a force from without. Never, never should I have risen of myself! But the thunderbolt has fallen. I accept the torture of accusation, and my public shame, I want to suffer and by suffering I shall be purified.20
In order to understand this clearly masochistic declaration, a psychoanalyst would want to know something about the events leading up to it. As it turns out, Dmitrii had taken a nap before his speech because he was so exhausted by the long interrogation of the investigators into his alleged crime. While asleep he had a vivid dream, and this dream tells us much about Dmitrii’s motivation.
In the dream Dmitrii sees depressing sights—a cold, November steppe, a village in which half of the huts are gutted by fire, poor peasant women standing about, cold, thin and wan. Particularly striking is the image of a mother with her extremely unhappy child:
In her arms was a little baby crying. And her breasts seemed so dried up that there was not a drop of milk in them. And the child cried and cried, and held out its little bare arms, with its little fists blue from cold.
“Why are they crying? Why are they crying?” Mitya asked, as they [Mitya and his driver] dashed gaily by.
“It’s the babe [ditë],” answered the driver, “the babe weeping.”
And Mitya was struck by his saying, in his peasant way, “the babe,” and he liked the peasant’s calling it a “babe.” There seemed more pity in it [zhalosti budto bol’she].
“But why is it weeping,” Mitya persisted stupidly, “why are its little arms bare? Why don’t they wrap it up?”
“The babe’s cold, its little clothes are frozen and don’t warm it”
“But why is it? Why?” foolish Mitya still persisted.
“Why don’t they feed the babe?” Dmitrii asks desperately. Feeling “a passion of pity [umilenie], such as he had never known before” Dmitrii wants to cry, he wants to do something “so that the babe should weep no more, so that the dark-faced, dried-up mother should not weep, so that no one should shed tears again from that moment.”21 Then he hears the reassuring voice of his beloved Grushenka, who promises to remain with him for the rest of his life (implicitly, even in Siberia). He wakes up, a radiant smile on his face.
Given that Dmitrii has just had such a dream, it is not surprising that he immediately begins his speech with the following words: “Gentlemen, we’re all cruel [vse my zhestoki], we’re all monsters, we all make people weep, including mothers, and babes at the breast.”22 But what has this persisting image of an unhappy babe at the breast got to do with Dmitrii’s own current unhappiness? He continues: “but of all, let it be settled here, now, of all I am the lowest reptile! Every day of my life, beating my breast, I’ve sworn to amend, and every day I’ve done the same filthy things. I understand now that such men as I need a blow of destiny.”23—that is, a blow of sud’ba, and so on, as we saw above.
The breast imagery thus carries over into Dmitrii’s castigation of himself. He beats his own breast (“biia sebia v grud’”) right after saying that he is guilty of making women and babes at the breast (“grudnykh detei”) cry, which in turn is right after his dream about an extremely unhappy baby crying at its mother’s inadequate breast (“grudi-to… takie issokhshie”).
All of this business about breasts constitutes extraordinarily primal psychical material. Dmitrii’s dream seems to have carried him very far back in time. Dmitrii is miserable in his present situation, just as a child at the breast is miserable when the breast/mother does not feed it. Previous psychoanalytic readers of the dream agree that the mother and child in the dream represent Dmitrii’s dead, abandoning mother and Dmitrii himself as a child.24 Whether or not one agrees with such an interpretation, it has to be admitted that some kind of connection exists between Dmitrii’s masochistic welcoming of a blow of sud’ba and the mother/breast imagery of the immediately preceding dream. This connection will be explored below, after the relevant clinical considerations have been raised.
Tat’iana Larina
If Dmitrii Karamazov’s sud’ba is to suffer in prison for a parricide he desired to commit but in fact did not commit, the sud’ba of Tat’iana Larina, heroine of Aleksandr Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin, is simpler. It is to suffer rejection by the man she loves. But she welcomes his rejection of her and her subsequent suffering quite as much as Dmitrii welcomes the opportunity to purify himself in prison. Vasilii Rozanov classifies her as a “passion sufferer” (“Strastoterpitsa”).25
True, Tat’iana does not initially wish to be rejected, to be punished. That was not the enterprise she originally had in mind. Rather, she had wished to be sexually united with the man who has swept her off her feet. But so profound is the attraction to Onegin, so totally does she commit herself to him, that she is prepared to accept anything he deems appropriate as a response, including rejection. She hands over control of her sud’ba to Onegin, as we saw earlier in a passage quoted from her love letter to him. Other passages as well in the letter depict the extent of her surrender:
The sympathetic narrator tells us that poor Tat’iana’s sud’ba is in the hands of a “fashionable tyrant.” But after a while we begin to get the impression that Tat’iana, whom Dostoevsky called “the apotheosis of the Russian woman,”28 likes to be tyrannized. She feels that she will “perish” because of Onegin, but also that “perishing from him is lovely.”29 Her soul, “avid of sadness” (“pechali zhadnoi”) after being rejected by Onegin, continues to ache for him.30 She suffers much, and her suffering is very Russian.31 Hers is the same soul, the same “dusha,” that the narrator had previously characterized as Russian: “Tat’iana (being Russian, in her soul [russkaia dushoiu].”32 The critics agree that Tat’iana’s folksy Russianness is one of her essential features.33