Why Fyodor Karamazov Hates the Man He Wronged
Asked why he hated a certain man, Fyodor Karamazov once answered:
“He has done me no harm. But I played him a dirty trick, and ever since I have hated him.”
His listener has asked him to account for an enmity. Fyodor answers by admitting an offense of his own, with enough command of the explanation to make it sound like a joke. For a moment, his candor can make us enjoy listening to someone who has just given us a reason to distrust him.
The exchange reaches us as a memory in Book II, Chapter VIII of The Brothers Karamazov. After disgracing himself at the monastery, Fyodor is getting into his carriage when he pauses and remembers his answer. Dostoevsky has placed the admission at a moment when its speaker still has to decide how to behave.
Who has done what to whom
The opening sentence clears the hated man of the relevant charge: he has caused Fyodor no harm. In the next sentence, the injury changes direction, with Fyodor admitting what he did to him and then making that act explain the hatred. The answer proceeds without hesitation even as the facts give us reason to expect the opposite conclusion. An admission of his own offense ought to weaken Fyodor’s grievance against the other man.
The act is already judged in the terms he chooses for it: a deliberate piece of nastiness for which he offers no extenuating circumstance. We need not first convince him that he has something to be ashamed of, since his own account includes that knowledge.
The reply leaves the emotional connection between the offense and the hatred unstated. The wronged man can remind Fyodor of an action he would prefer to forget. An encounter that should direct his attention toward what he has done becomes an irritation with the person who makes him remember it. The man need not accuse him; remembering his own conduct may be enough.
Dostoevsky gives us no encounter between these two men. We infer the connection from an explanation in which the injured person has done nothing to account for the hostility directed at him.
Someone embarrassed by a past cruelty might avoid the person who remembers it. Fyodor says he hates him. The strength of that word preserves the aggression in his reaction, as he acknowledges the man’s innocence while continuing to direct hostility toward him. Whatever discomfort he feels has become a reason to resent the person he injured.
Without a name or a specified offense, we have little with which to reconstruct the relationship. The omissions keep our attention on the direction of the feeling. Dostoevsky stops the remembered answer at the hatred, leaving us to pursue the consequences of an admission the speaker is willing to leave there.
The repentance Miusov supplies
Immediately before the narration follows Fyodor to his carriage, Miusov has been explaining his absence to the Father Superior. He says that Fyodor recognizes his fault, feels sincere shame, and hopes to make amends. The speech gives the assembled company a familiar sequence: acknowledgment of an offense leads to regret and the intention to repair it. Miusov ends thoroughly pleased with himself.
Dostoevsky then moves from this reassuring account to the man it describes. Fyodor does recognize that he has disgraced himself, enough to feel that staying for dinner would be improper. As he remembers his earlier answer, however, his thoughts turn toward further provocation. The sequence makes us compare what Miusov’s account promises with what Fyodor’s self-knowledge actually does. He can understand that he has behaved disgracefully and use the resulting embarrassment to prepare another attack.
The narrator even has Miusov recover his love of humanity once his speech is finished. His account has settled the incident to his own satisfaction before Fyodor has finished deciding what to do. Dostoevsky makes room for pleasure in both accounts of the disgrace: Miusov can enjoy his tact, and Fyodor his shamelessness. The monks have received an apology on behalf of a man who is about to return and abuse them again.
After the admission
Dostoevsky attaches the recollection to a small sequence of bodily movements. Fyodor smiles maliciously; his eyes gleam and his lips quiver. He tells the coachman to wait and goes back to the monastery. The pause gives the memory the duration of a decision. His old answer is available to him as he chooses to return, and the earlier offense supplies a precedent for his present wish to punish people because he has behaved badly in front of them.
The narrator is quite willing to explain that wish, including Fyodor’s desire to take revenge for his own conduct. The compression belongs to the remembered answer: it omits the emotional steps and makes us complete the explanation from the few relations it supplies. The surrounding scene gives the connection a use. Fyodor recalls the ugly truth about himself while preparing to act on the same motive again.
Even the narrator’s account of his loss of control comes with a qualification. Fyodor can stop short of conduct for which he could be legally punished. That limit makes it difficult to excuse the return as sheer helplessness. His excitement leaves him capable of protecting himself from a consequence he takes seriously.
His self-knowledge has limits of its own. At the meal, we can see how he invents a history of persecution by the monastery, becomes stirred by his own speech, and comes close to believing it. The narration separates the invention from the feeling it produces, allowing us to watch a false accusation become almost persuasive to the person who invented it.
Such a man who can state the source of his hatred so accurately can also help himself to grievances that would make his behavior seem justified. Recognition and self-deception occur within the same episode, without any intervening repentance.
By the time he is nearly weeping over injuries the monastery never inflicted, we have heard the clearer explanation already. His performance cannot erase it for us, even if it begins to persuade him. The brief admission has given the anger a cause before he furnishes it with excuses.
We know whose wrongdoing started it, and must go on listening while he accuses the monks.
Continue with Zosima’s Bow to Dmitri: Can a Soul Be Saved?
Sources
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Book II, Chapter VIII, “The Scandalous Scene,” translated by Constance Garnett. Read the chapter at Project Gutenberg. The quotation follows Garnett; names in the article use contemporary English transliterations.
The passage was also checked against the Russian text, Book II, Chapter VIII, “Скандал,” at the Russian Virtual Library. Fyodor calls his act shameless and explicitly makes the hatred begin immediately after it, because of it. The suggestion that the other man recalls his wrongdoing is an interpretation of the admission, not a separately narrated meeting.
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