The Senseless Man

Brothers Karamazov, Book I — Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov

Dostoevsky's narrator introduces Fyodor Pavlovitch with a careful qualification: he is not stupid. He is senseless, which is different.

"He was not stupid, however — indeed he was capable of remarkable astuteness — but he was a senseless fellow." This isn't contradiction. The narrator is separating two things that usually travel together: cognitive ability and the kind of self-awareness that constrains behavior. Fyodor Pavlovitch has the first and completely lacks the second. He dies with a hundred thousand roubles — he was excellent at protecting his material interests. But he was "one of the most senseless, fantastical fellows in the whole district."

Senselessness here seems to mean: he has no self-image that requires defense. When his first wife abandons him and runs off with another man, he doesn't retreat into humiliated silence. He performs the abandoned husband to anyone who will listen, adding embellishments, playing the comic role with relish. "He was glad of a new comic part in which to play the buffoon." The humiliation became material. He was already moving on to the next available role before the feeling could land.

This is usually read as pure vice. The elder sons Dmitri and Ivan grow up half-parentless because of it; Alyosha's mother is terrified into religious mania; the household is organized around one man's performing whatever comes to hand. Fyodor Pavlovitch is a bad father and a bad husband and a dishonest man. Dostoevsky doesn't obscure any of this.

But something more interesting is happening alongside the condemnation. Fyodor Pavlovitch has a kind of freedom that almost no other character in the novel has. He is not protecting a self-narrative. He doesn't need to appear dignified, or consistent, or as the kind of man he has decided to be. The performance IS him — there's no authentic underneath the performance is betraying.

Compare Miüsov, the liberal of the forties who has known Proudhon and Bakunin, and is now mostly irritable about monastic fishing rights. Miüsov has a self-image to protect — the enlightened Western man, above all this provincial buffoonery — and so is constantly performing dignity he doesn't quite feel. His contempt for Fyodor Pavlovitch reads in part as the contempt of a man who has chosen a more flattering bad faith for the man who doesn't bother. Miüsov can't actually enjoy anything in the monastery scene because he's too occupied managing how it looks that he's here.

Fyodor Pavlovitch, arriving at the same scene, immediately plays the buffoon with the elders — ostentatiously counting himself unworthy of the reverend fathers, performing elaborate ritual uncertainty about who to bow to, turning everything into comedy. It's awful. It's also genuine, in the way that completely unself-conscious behavior is genuine. He isn't pretending to be irreverent. He is irreverent. No gap.

Sartre would call this the worst kind of bad faith: the man who has made himself entirely into a thing, a social role, with no gap between mask and face. The authentic person maintains the gap — knows they are performing, keeps open the possibility of being otherwise. Fyodor Pavlovitch has collapsed the gap. He has made himself a buffoon so thoroughly that no other self is available.

But Dostoevsky doesn't quite endorse this diagnosis. What Fyodor Pavlovitch can access — because he doesn't need to be seen a certain way — is rawness. His vices are uglier without the self-regulation that a self-image would impose. But his moments of genuine feeling are correspondingly unmediated. The narrator gives us: "He was wicked and sentimental." Not as condemnation. As character.

His real grief at his first wife's death is described as real grief. His genuine affection for Alyosha — "he set his heart on him" — is given without irony. He is capable of these feelings because he hasn't learned to protect himself from them by performing composure. When he cries, he cries badly, obviously, without the buffer of dignity. When he loves, there's no performed love to substitute for the real thing.

The self-image requirement, in other characters, does double work. It keeps them from the worst vices (they would be ashamed). But it also keeps them from the worst directness. They modulate. Fyodor Pavlovitch doesn't modulate.

The novel asks, without quite answering: is there something you can access when self-image requirement drops to zero that the self-respecting characters cannot reach?

The comparison set is interesting. Raskolnikov tried to maintain an extraordinary-man theory and was destroyed by it — the theory required behavior he couldn't actually sustain, and the gap between the theory and the reality was the whole novel. The underground man maintained a victim-theory and calcified into resentment — no energy could leave the system because everything had to pass through the self-narrative. Fyodor Pavlovitch maintains nothing and is grotesque but mobile. He just keeps moving.

Zossima (who arrives later) will turn out to have abandoned self-image through a different path — penance, the deliberate dismantling of superiority. Alyosha keeps almost no self-image, but out of genuine humility rather than its absence. Fyodor Pavlovitch's version is the one that arrives through no work at all — it just fell away, or was never there.

The question Dostoevsky leaves open: is the mobility worth the vices? Is Fyodor Pavlovitch's terrible, obvious, unedited emotional life a better or worse substrate for actual human contact than the polished, careful self-presentation of the liberals and the rationalists around him?

The narrator doesn't decide. "We ourselves are, too," he says — naïve and simple-hearted, more than we suppose. The narrator isn't horrified by Fyodor Pavlovitch. He's identified.

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