The story goes that when my mom was a young woman and her father was in the final stages of his illness, she said to him that she had made peace with the fact that he was going to pass on but asked, “when you’re gone just send me a sign that you’re still there somehow, anything, it doesn’t have to be much.” To which he responded, quickly and mechanically, “if you need a sign it means you don’t really believe.”

Dostoevsky seems to have had a similar battle of faith raging inside of him. Characters beg for miracles in The Brothers Karamazov, they expect miracles. But in place of miracles they are left only with mystery. It seems that, to Fyodor Dostoevsky, the only way to truly bring your conscience under reign is through the acceptance of that mystery rather than through the proof of miracles.

Perhaps this is fitting for a man, Fyodor Dostoevsky, writing about a foolish father named Fyodor Karamazov being murdered in a backwards fictitious village. And maybe this meditation on miracles and faith also explains why Alexei Karamazov, the reported protagonist of The Brothers Karamazov shares the same name as Dostoevsky’s own son, Alexei Dostoevsky, who died at the age of three, one year before the first installment of The Brothers Karamazov was published.

Indeed, Alexei doesn’t fit in with any other character in this book or any other that Dostoevsky wrote. He is simply too good for the black sludge-dripping worlds that Dostoevsky creates. Because, I think, he isn’t really a character, he is Dostoevsky giving his son life, not in the world where Dostoevsky lived and saw so much cruelty that may have corrupted his son, but as an angel moving through a world that is exactly as corrupting as Dostoevsky’s pen allows it to be. Where other characters pull their psyches and monologues from the mind of the author Fyodor, he places the angel of his son in the role of messenger, άγγελος, to flit between the character crises that Dostoevsky has written into his world with grace and dignity.

And so how could Dostoevsky not meditate on miracles and evil and the role of faith in such a book? In The Brothers Karamazov Ivan mentions that there are three things that  can hold the human conscience: authority, miracle, and mystery. We see the ascetic monk Father Ferapont beset by devils as his only reward for a live of hellish devotion to minor rituals of isolation, more austere in his self-imposed authority than any church could be.

Then we see Ivan’s own arguments against the church and faith. He is an avowed atheist. How sad that we can read Dostoevsky’s own internal conflict in him. Ivan claims that he cannot believe in a God that allows the horrific acts of evil that occur on earth and the amount of suffering in our world. He says that no deity could justify the suffering of even a single child, and that, if he is expected to believe then he can’t possibly do so with some expectation of salvation out in infinity. He has a Euclidean mind that understands only the tangible and the three dimensional; he can’t be saddled with the impossible burden of believing that parallel lines will meet out in infinity. He needs to know here or else he feels there is no justification for the horrors he has witnessed in the world. Horrors that come straight from Dostoevsky’s own reading of the modern press. In response to Ivan’s demands for proof, implicitly for miracles, he is visited by apparitions of the literal Devil or some general demon who brings his mind to ruin.

Then, for reigning in man’s conscience we have seen the folly of authority and miracle. We are left only with mystery, and thus, the world in which we live. We are left with the pieces of a world of faith, as Dostoevsky outlines it. It is very clear from the lack of miracles in the world that we must find a way to exist without direct proof of the divine. So the three brothers choose the earth but each for different, sometimes perilous, reasons.

Dmitri’s love for this world comes in a revelation after he has been accused of the murder of his father: “if God is driven from the earth, we’ll meet him underground! It’s impossible for a convict to be without God, even more impossible for a non-convict! And then from the depths of the earth, we, the men underground, will start singing a tragic hymn to God, in whom there is joy! Hail to God and his joy! I love him!…No, life is full, there is life underground too!”

Ivan’s love of the world is one of Realism and contains its own deep beauty: “Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one’s heart prizes them….I love the sticky little leaves in spring, the blue sky – That’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic; It’s loving with ones inside, with one’s stomach.”

And finally, somehow in contrast to his two brothers but so closely aligned with them, we have Alyosha, leaving the room that could’ve contained the one miracle he wanted to truly believe in, instead infernally transmuted to the stink of a rotting corpse: “[Alyosha] suddenly turned abruptly and walked out of the cell…He did not stop on the porch, either, but went quickly down the steps. Filled with rapture, his soul yearned for freedom, space, vastness. Over him the heavenly dome, full of quiet, shining stars, hung boundlessly. From the zenith to the horizon the still-dim Milky Way stretched its double strand. Night, fresh and quiet, almost unstirring, enveloped the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the church gleamed in the sapphire sky. The luxuriant autumn flowers in the flowerbeds near the house had fallen asleep until morning. The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens, the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars…Alyosha stood gazing and suddenly, as if he had been cut down, threw himself to the earth.”

So much of what makes Dostoevsky the father of modern literature, and Russian literature specifically, is right here. He firmly answers the question that plagues his time, “can we have Christian values without explicit Christian faith,” in the negative. And he answers it by showing us the importance of mystery, how it can be a bridge between any two scales that man can perceive. He brings Realism into the world through his harsh critiques of modern Realism and his yearning for something more ancient even than the twilight-lit Romanticism of his age. He looks to Pushkin and Gogol and Shakespeare and instead chooses Job, chooses John and The Word, chooses Isaac the Syrian. He looks at Shishkin, at Kramskoi, at Vrubel, at Repin. He sees only one thing in the art of his day: Job’s shadowy glare on the side of the road in Repin’s unintentional masterpiece “Job and His Friends”, the accidental birth of Realism. Dostoevsky would bring the twelfth century Golden Haired Angel icon into a world of nationalism, liberalism, isolating freedom, and filthy maggot-ridden humanity. He would give his lost son a second chance at life and he would give us a new age of the modern novel. And like the characters trying to discern the intentions of Ivan’s article on ecclesiastical courts, the main question we can ask of the father of Realism is, “is he being ironic?” Well, does it matter? If you need confirmation then maybe you don’t really believe.