The Dream of the Babe

from The Brothers Karamazov — Book IX

The prosecutors are interrogating Mitya for six hours. He is exhausted, physically searched, humiliated. They have found the wad of money he's been hiding for three months — fifteen hundred rubles sewn into an amulet, money he kept secret from everyone, money whose existence he lied about because revealing it would have required explaining the whole disaster. He has confessed to lying about it. He has not confessed to murder because he didn't commit it.

At some point during the interrogation, he falls asleep. He has a dream.

In the dream he is in a Russian village in winter. The huts are burnt out. He is riding in a cart through mud. Women stand by the road, thin, with dark, burnt faces. One holds a baby. The baby is crying, thin, its little arms blue with cold. The mother can't feed it. She stands there. She doesn't understand.

Mitya asks the driver: "Why are they poor? Why don't they sing songs? Why are they blackened with poverty? Why don't they feed the babe?"

He understands that his questions are senseless, that the answers don't exist. But his heart is burning. He wants to do something for them — for everyone. He wants it right then.

"And he felt that a passion had surged up in his heart, that he wanted to weep, that he wanted to do something for them all, so that the babe should weep no more, so that the dark-faced, dried-up mother should not weep, that there should be no more tears from this moment, and that it could be done at once, that it must be done at once, without delay and despite everything, with the Karamazov impatience."

Then he wakes up and the first thing he says is: "Gentlemen, I've had a good dream."

He asks if they will forgive him. He asks about Grushenka. He is told she is there, that she followed him. He cries.

The dream is doing what Ivan's argument couldn't.

Book V is the famous rebellion: Ivan constructs the theodicy problem with precision and declines to endorse the world. He has a catalogue of children's suffering — real stories, collected from newspapers, told to Alyosha across a table in a tavern. The logic is correct. If God exists and the world requires this suffering, he returns the ticket. He will not be reconciled.

Ivan's question is: can these tears be justified? His answer is: no. His response is: I decline.

Mitya has the same impulse. He sees the babe crying, thin, blue-armed, hungry. He asks why. He knows his questions are senseless — the novel's phrasing is precise: he "understood that his questions were senseless, that the answers didn't exist." He is not proposing a theodicy. He is not solving the problem.

His response is: I want to do something for them all, right now, despite everything.

Ivan's response and Mitya's response start from the same place. One is philosophical, one is immediate. One declines, one surges. Ivan returns the ticket. Mitya asks what he can do right now.

What's strange about the dream is its context.

Mitya is accused of murdering his father. He is, by his own admission, a scoundrel — he has been lying, spending money, deceiving people, failing the woman he loves, living out the full chaos of Karamazov nature. He is physically humiliated in the interrogation scene: they make him take off his socks, strip down, stand there. He endures it with something that keeps trying to be dignity and keeps slipping.

And in the middle of all of this, he has a dream about suffering children, and his heart burns with wanting to do something for them.

The novel doesn't comment on this. Dostoevsky doesn't editorialize about whether Mitya is sincere or deluded or doing some psychological displacement. It just shows you the dream and shows you Mitya waking from it saying "I've had a good dream."

The implication, I think, is that the dream is genuine. That Mitya — reckless, self-destructive, lying, passionate, incapable of self-control — is also capable of this response to suffering. That the Karamazov nature contains both. That the same intensity that produces disaster when aimed at money and women produces something else when aimed at the image of the hungry baby.

The "scoundrel/thief distinction" shows up in the same interrogation.

Mitya insists on it with great force. He hid the fifteen hundred rubles, he lied about it, he is a scoundrel — he admits all of this. But he did not steal from his father's envelope. He did not kill him. He is a scoundrel but not a thief, and the distinction matters to him more than his life.

This is the same moral sensibility that produces the dream. Mitya is incapable of the careful ethical reasoning that Ivan practices, the patient Christlike love that Alyosha practices. But he has something else: a raw insistence on distinctions that matter, even when he can't articulate why they matter, even when his own behavior has been chaotic and dishonest in a hundred other directions.

The scoundrel/thief distinction and the dream of the babe are the same feature of Mitya's character: an immediate, hot, untheoretical moral intensity that can't be trained or argued into precision but is not, for that reason, less real.

Ivan is the cleverest man in the novel. His argument is the best argument. He sees the problem most clearly, frames it most rigorously, and draws the correct conclusion from his premises.

Mitya can't articulate any of this. But he wakes up from his dream and says he's had a good dream, and he asks if they'll forgive him, and he asks about Grushenka.

The novel is interested in both of them. It doesn't say one is right and one is wrong. It shows you what each mode of responding to suffering produces: Ivan, unable to act because he has reasoned himself into a corner. Mitya, waking up wanting to do something for the babe right now, despite everything, with Karamazov impatience.

Both know the baby is crying. Neither can stop it. But they do different things with that knowledge.