“It is my spirit that addresses your spirit”―Jane Eyre.
Vyacheslav Ivanov was one of the most insightful interpreters of Fyodor Dostoevsky. In his seminal work, A Study in Dostoevsky: Freedom and the Tragic Life, Ivanov intuited that the great writer was deeply preoccupied with how humans interact with each other, especially as a subject-to-subject relation. He called it the “miracle of communion with the other… which is achieved through the self-surrender of personality… and its self-recovery in… the real oneness of the human race.” Once I came across Ivanov’s illuminating analysis, I knew exactly where in his novels Dostoevsky enacted for us the moment of such communion. It will require a significant setting of the scene before we reach the moment of intersubjective knowledge as masterfully described by Dostoevsky. The background to the scene is equally important and must be grasped as a whole, before the moment the subjects meet, to understand what Dostoevsky tries to achieve.
Alyosha Karamazov is one of the main characters in The Brothers Karamazov. He is in training to enter monastic life under the spiritual direction of Fr. Zosima. Alyosha is, by all accounts, a bright and saintly soul who undergoes a deep spiritual crisis at a crucial point in the story. At the beginning of the novel, we meet a young man happily diligently following his spiritual director’s lead. Alyosha has nourished his Christian faith, feeding on the life of the humble monk, Fr. Zosima—a holy man fully devoted to loving God and people.
When Zosima dies, his body begins to smell of decomposition almost immediately. But in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, a truly holy man, once dead, does not decay or smell of decomposition. In fact, the smell of decomposition points to the opposite—the apparent sinfulness of the person. Alyosha’s faith was shaken. He was at a complete loss to reconcile the holy man he knew and loved with the deathly stench of Zosima’s decomposing body. Setting aside for the moment the discussion of why Dostoevsky chose to create this conflict with the Eastern Orthodox tradition of Incorruptibility, my goal is first to focus on how Dostoevsky achieves the interpersonal knowledge in his characters.
Following the death and accelerated decomposition of Fr. Zosima’s body, Alyosha enters a profound state of spiritual and epistemic crisis. He is losing his religion, as the song goes, with every passing moment, entering deeper and deeper into the state of spiritual atrophy. Ivanov notices that in Dostoevsky’s novels, solitude and alienation always lead to evil outcomes, resulting in spiritual and, often, physical death. We find Alyosha alone and disoriented when Rakitin, a two-faced seminarian, meets him and invites Alyosha to visit Grushenka’s house.
For those who did not read the novel, Grushenka is beautiful, independent, and proud. She is the object of almost all men’s desires in their little town, and she is at the very center of the conflict between Karamazov, the father, and his eldest son Dmitriy. Both are madly in love with her. Grushenka wields incredible power over men, and she knows it. She often enjoys conquering foolish men. She knows how much of an object she is for men around her and indulges in playing that part skilfully, turning tables and fancying herself as a cat in the proverbial mouse chase. It was well understood what visiting Grushenka’s house entailed. Alyosha understood it too, and, as he was tumbling down, decided to let go and let gravity pull him to the very bottom.
Up until that moment, Alyosha avoided interaction with Grushenka, unsure of his ability to withstand temptation should it arise, and fearing his own weakness and failure. His fears were well justified, for as soon as Alyosha and Rakitin entered her apartment and sat on the sofa, she placed herself on Alyosha’s lap and put her hands around his neck. Not only readers, but Alyosha himself, it seemed, was curious about his own reaction to the present situation.
To his surprise, he found himself impervious to her charms, perhaps due to his deep sense of grief over the death of Fr. Zosima. At that moment, Grushenka was not an object of his sexual desire, nor the stone over which he would stumble and fall. He recognized a lonely woman, suffering from unresolved betrayals; she needed compassion and love. Alyosha reaches what Ivanov called “ecumenical consciousness.” He sees that she is a subject like him, not an object. So he calls Grushenka his sister in this world of suffering and grief.
Grushenka, too, realizing that Alyosha is not reducing her to a sexual object and seeing his profound grief and alienation over the death of his beloved mentor, takes off her mask, extending her compassion to Alyosha. She gives up the cat-and-mouse game, confesses her intention to ruin Alyosha, and thanks him for calling her a sister. Alyosha was the first human being who could perceive her as a real person, the one she tried so hard to hide.
At the moment when Alyosha and Grushenka meet as subjects, both “self-surrender” their own persons, using Ivanov’s terms. Leaving behind preoccupation with their own selves, they transcend themselves and meet each other as part of a unified humanity. What follows then is a “self-recovery,” when each recovers their own true person, regenerated and enlivened by that unifying spiritual force.
If alienation and isolation produce only the death and destruction of the person (think Ivan Karamazov or Stavrogin in The Possessed), then this unification in intersubjective knowledge leads to regeneration and ultimately to salvation. After Alyosha and Grushenka meet as subjects, he tells her that she has saved him. That moment changes both Grushenka and Alyosha, leading them towards further spiritual renewal.
Why, then, could Alyosha’s filial love for Zosima not produce this awakening and spiritual regeneration? Here, I must return to the stinking body of Zosima. I believe that the accelerated decomposition of Zosima’s body is not a mere narrative device, created by Dostoevsky to induce the crisis of faith in Alyosha, nor to introduce Dostoevsky’s personal disagreement with the doctrines of the Orthodox church. I propose that, in view of the scene described above, which follows immediately after the news of Zosoma’s body stench, Dostoevsky presents a more complex picture.
Alyosha deeply loved Zosima. He was a holy man who offered Alyosha fatherly love, something he had never experienced from his own father. Yet, for Alyosha, his love for Zosima remained external; he was an object of Alyosha’s love and adoration. Alyosha never had a spiritual encounter with him; hence, that love could not produce a regeneration in Alyosha’s heart. The immediate decay and deathly stench of Zosima’s body signify the nature of Alyosha’s relationship to Zosima; it was, to put it bluntly, according to the flesh. Zosima’s external body, his flesh, could not provide a way to true transformation for Alyosha. That had to happen in the spirit—in the moment of spiritual knowledge of “the other-Ego,” as Ivanov called it.
The great irony of the story is that it was not the holy and humble man who offered Alyosha a way to salvation, but a villain, herself in need of saving. This experience of intersubjective knowing, oneness, and spiritual love offered a way to salvation for both Alyosha and Grushenka. Both were lost and now found themselves in the shared human unity, a spiritual reality, that set them on the course of transformation.
Dostoevsky was one of the few writers who used fiction as a superior medium for exploring what is possible and how the intersubjective knowledge (or subject-to-subject relationship) can occur in real life. One of his faithful followers was Nikolay Berdyaev. For him, as it was for Dostoevsky, the truth is never abstract; it is in the subject. The true and real human existence is always in the mystery of the individual, always personal, interior, and never fully subjected to the physical laws of nature. Therefore, whenever we view another person as an object, in a purely exterior way (even if it is our own self), it is no longer the real person, but our projection or representation, which, more often than not, resembles the real person only a little. What is at stake, then, when we fail to reach the intersubjective knowledge of another person, is nothing less than reality itself—the true nature of human existence. More precisely, it is our capacity to perceive and understand what is real: to recognize the genuine person, rather than the version we construct in our own minds.
Secondly, Berdyaev asserts that truth (or true human existence) is never purely subjective. While each subject, each person is a whole universe, subjects are never isolated. They are united together in God. The realisation of this unity occurs when subjects meet as subjects and achieve a “synthesizing spirituality, which leads to inner unity and the union of man with man.” Only then can we be unified not only with another human being, but with humanity as a whole, something objectification can not achieve, for it inevitably creates separation between subjects and objects.
Humans are spiritual beings, Berdyaev insists, they are always more than their mere physical nature. Therefore, according to him, the intersubjective knowledge represents a spiritual mode of knowing when two human beings come to know each other as the bearers and sharers in the Divine: “People can be united only in God-manhood, not in the human; a unity of the human exists, but it is a spiritual unity.”
The stakes are indeed much higher than we may think. For Dostoevsky, intersubjective knowledge is nothing other than love in its truest form. To know someone in this way is to love them. Moreover, to know someone as a subject is to know and love the way God does. As it is for Berdyaev and Dostoevsky, intersubjective knowledge reveals what is real through the actual person and allows unification with humanity as a whole, but that’s not all. For the great writer, this love, this intersubjective mode of knowledge, is in a sense salvific—a chance for real, moral, and spiritual regeneration of the soul.