Question about the Brothers Karamazov

I read the Brothers Karamazov last year and very much enjoyed it. However, looking at the trope page for it I've become a bit surprised at how everyone seems to interpret the ending.

SPOILERS

Everyone I can see on the web seems to take it as a given that Smerdyakov is Fyodor Pavlovitch's killer and that Dimitri is definitely innocent of patricide. However, that was not the impression I got from reading the book. The only confirmation the book gives on Smerdyakov's guilt is from Ivan's perspective, and Ivan has explicitly been hallucinating. I thought the book was setting up a very Ambiguous Situation and keeping the possibility that Ivan imagined the entire encounter with Smerdyakov and personally provided the money at the trial to cover for Dimitri. The sheer amount of circumstance required for Smerdyakov to have killed Fyodor as suggested honestly made that interpretation seem more probable to me. However, this interpretation doesn't seem to be all that represented from what I can find online.

So I guess I wanted to ask, is the interpretation that Ivan hallucinated Smerdyakov's confession contradicted by the book, and is it a common interpetation?

It's been a long while since I read the book, but as I recall, I don't think we're supposed to take Ivan's hallucinations as a sign that his perception of reality is impaired. Just the opposite: given the book's huge focus on Christianity, and the way Ivan's hallucinations focus on spiritual matters (most prominently the devil), I think we're supposed to read him as having a sort of spiritual revelation that he just can't bring himself to accept.

The idea of Ivan hallucinating Smerdyakov's confession kind of fits his development, though: With Ivan becoming less nihilistic and possibly giving up on his atheism, he becomes more desperate for his brother not to be a murderer doomed to eternal damnation. Hence, he convinces himself despite all evidence to the contrary that Smerdyakov is the real killer and that Dmitri is really innocent.

I just really felt like this was what Dostoevsky was implying, or at least that he deliberately left it a viable interpretation because, really, the explanation we hear from Smerdyakov is rather contrived. The frame-up he claims to have pulled off required Dmitri to have openly planned to kill his father only to chicken out at the last possible moment, and for Smerdyakov to have a conveniently timed epilepsy at exactly the right moment to probide an alibi. For me the scene had all the markings of the delirious Ivan trying to rationalise a wildly unlikely scenario in his head.

Dostoevsky was a pre-Freudian writer, though. I'm not sure how well established the idea of subconscious desires expressed in such a manner was in Big D's day.

One could also posit that the encounter with Smerdyakov was real, but that Smerdyakov simply lied about killing Fyodor in order to fuck with Ivan and guilt him by pointing out his supposed complicity; Smerdyakov's only real crime having been to steal the money after Fyodor's death. That would strike me as pretty in-character for him.

I dunno, I guess I'm just surprised that his guilt is apparently meant to be taken at face value given how much evidence the book seems to support against it. But maybe I just wasn't in the right mindset to get what Dostoevsky was going for.

It's also been a while since I've read Karamazov, but I don't think the coincidences that allowed Smerdyakov to commit the murder were that much worse than any other Contrived Coincidences that unambiguously really happened in some of Dostoevsky's other stories. In Crime and Punishment, random happenstance is how Raskolnikov evades arrest for so long. Like, I recall one point where Raskolnikov is in the police station, and he thinks the police are already on to him, and he's on the verge of confessing. Then a construction worker, who'd been near the scene of the crime, rushes in to confess that he's guilty! And Raskolnikov slips away in the resulting confusion.

edited 25th Oct '17 9:55:41 AM by MetaFour

I think Dostoyevsky intended Smerdyakov to be the literal, physical murderer. However, I think he intended this fact to be almost beside the point: Smerdyakov, Dmitry, Ivan, and Alyosha were all patricidal in their own peculiar ways, and whoever's hand wielded the weapon is treated as almost academic. In Dostoyevsky's moral perspective, the sin was shared among the brothers, and their fates couldn't be analyzed as if one were guilty and three innocent.

You're right, but I'm still surprised that my interpretation doesn't seem to a common alternate reading, given the wiggle room and implications (intentional or not on Dostoevsky's part) the book allows for it. It was just something that immediately struck me what I was reading it.