Family

The Theme in the Work

Family is the material of the novel before it is its crime. Book I tells, in five chapters, how Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov marries twice, has three sons, and raises none of them: Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov is forgotten in a servant's hut and passes from hand to hand; Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov and Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov are taken in by a vindictive generalsha and by an honorable benefactor. The father reappears in each one's life as an adult, for money or out of boredom, and the house to which the three return to draw closer is a place where no one knows how to be a father or a son. The surname functions as destiny, and Rakitin sums it up in a list of appetites. The book makes of this arrangement a question for the courtroom, what a father is, which the prosecutor and the defense attorney answer in opposite ways before the jury, and the question extends to the other houses the novel visits: that of Captain Snegiryov, where the nine-year-old son consoles his humiliated father, and that of Alyosha's children, who in the Epilogue gain a brotherhood that the family of blood never had.

In ch. II of Book I, the narrator separates abandonment from hatred in the way the father treats the first son.

In ch. VII of Book II, Rakitin sums up the nature of the Karamazovs in a list.

In ch. VIII of Book III, after the father speaks of Alyosha's mother as if she belonged to him alone, Ivan interrupts him.

In ch. IX of Book III, Mitya knocks down the servant Grigory and strikes his father, and Grigory, standing by the table, says what he feels.

Fyodor, with his face swollen, confesses to Alyosha whom he is afraid of.

In ch. II of Book IV, Alyosha, whom the father treats with the only gentleness he has, answers him with a diagnosis.

In ch. VII of Book IV, Captain Snegiryov tells Alyosha what his son did after the humiliation in the square, and the scene by the stone shows another house in which father and son protect each other.

In ch. VIII of Book XI, Smerdyakov, the son no one acknowledges, tells Ivan whose son he is.

In ch. XIII of Book XII, Fetyukovich defines the father in the middle of the courtroom.

He gives voice to the son who demands from his father a reason to love him.

In ch. XIV of Book XII, the prosecutor, in his rebuttal, takes the thesis as far as it frightens.

In ch. III of the Epilogue, the boys whom Ilyusha asked, as he died, to stay with his father come to the funeral, and the book ends with the cry of Kolya, who uses the family surname in a new way.

Who Embodies It

Fyodor is the father who is not one, and the book shows him without the haste of caricature. Mitya is the son who grows up with no one and claims what is owed him. Ivan is the son who is ashamed of his father and whom the father fears more than the violent one, and Alyosha is the only one the old man does not fear. Smerdyakov, the fourth, is the son whom the father denies and whom the household makes use of. Captain Snegiryov and Ilyusha are the other model, a poor family in which the son becomes a man to defend his father, and Kolya is the boy who, in the end, inherits Alyosha's brotherhood.

Where It Appears

• Book I, ch. II: Fyodor forgets Mitya, who goes to live with the servants and then passes from hand to hand.
• Book I, ch. III: The two sons of the second marriage end up in Grigory's hut and then with the generalsha.
• Book II, ch. VII: Rakitin describes the Karamazovs to Alyosha as sensualists, grasping men, and holy fools, and says that the whole question of the family fits in those three words.
• Book III, ch. VIII: Ivan reminds his father that Alyosha's mother was also his.
• Book III, ch. IX: Mitya strikes his father, and Fyodor says he is more afraid of Ivan than of him.
• Book IV, ch. II: Alyosha answers his father, who says he is bad to everyone except him, that Fyodor is not a bad man but a crippled one.
• Book IV, ch. VII: Captain Snegiryov recounts the scene of the son who wept beside the stone.
• Book XI, ch. VIII: Smerdyakov tells Ivan that he is the son who most resembles Fyodor.
• Book XII, ch. XIII: Fetyukovich tells the jurors that one who begot is not yet a father, since a father is one who begot and deserved the name.
• Book XII, ch. XIV: The prosecutor asks what will become of the family if each son demands from his father a reason to love him.
• Epilogue, ch. III: The boys, as Ilyusha asked, stay with his father, promise not to forget him, and shout hurrah for Karamazov.

Where the Readings Diverge

The novel admits two readings of what makes someone a father. In one, it is a given of blood and destiny: the surname, the same soul, the inheritance of appetite that Smerdyakov points out in Ivan. In the other, it is an achievement: a father is one who begot and deserved it, and the family that the Epilogue shows, made up of boys who choose to stay with an old man, does not depend on blood.

The same word that carries the bad inheritance, Karamazov, closes the book as a cry of friendship, and the text does not say that one thing erases the other. In ch. IX of Book XII, the prosecutor uses the surname to accuse, and in ch. III of the Epilogue, Kolya uses it to greet Alyosha. The family of the book is, thus, the place where one inherits and the place where one chooses, and the son who comes closest to fatherhood, Alyosha, exercises it over children who are not his. The lawyer's question, whether the father deserves the son's love, remains without a verdict: the jury condemns without answering it.