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DOSTOEVSKY’S ENDGAME: THE PROJECTED SEQUEL TO

THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV1

James L. Rice 

In memoriam

Reginald Ely Zelnik

. . . from a few rumors about the further contents of the novel,

rumors current in Petersburg literary circles, I can say only that

Aleksei [Karamazov] in time becomes the village schoolmaster,

and influenced by some sort of special psychological processesat work in his soul, he actually arrives at the idea of assassinating

the tsar [dokhodit dazhe do idei o tsareubiistve].

Z, “Zhurnal’nye zametki,” Novorossiiskii

Telegraf (Odessa), May 26/June 7, 18802

The Karamazov sequel is a threefold problem. First, we consider how twelve sources from nine hands (including the author’s) coalesce into a unified plot that is startling butplausible. As Dostoevsky told an unimpeachable witness, Alesha Karamazov would become a revolutionary, to be arrested and executed for a political crime – in which one recognizes the author’s own fate so narrowly escaped in his youth (Suvorin 1923).3

Secondly though also of necessity concurrently, as the sequel sources are vetted and assembled in a hypothetical plot, one naturally reconsiders the greatnovel that we know, to imagine how it was designed to accommodate such an outcome. Let it be noted at the outset, that almost all the sequel sources originate in the period when Dostoevsky was still writing and serializing The Brothers Karamazov. The sequel was thus an actively creative project, concurrent with the novel it was to culminate: a teleological factor in the nature of a subtext – byno means a mere afterthought. That Dostoevsky would in time have altered his plan typically (and necessarily with the actual death of the tsar) is irrelevent to this investigation, for he soon died leaving no drafts extant. The Brothers Karamazov and its sequel were conceived in an era when assassination attempts on the life of Alexander II were a routine occurrence. One of our sources revealsunequivocally how that fact influenced Dostoevsky’s creative design in this last major fiction.

Thirdly and lastly, the sequel’s extraordinary denouement requires at least a few speculative remarks about the personality and career of F. M. Dostoevsky, himself, if not in fact a revisionist vita – to explain this fictive endgame of political violence. Did he, then, live a life without “conversion”,without piously Orthodox patriotism, without lapsing into retrograde politics, without sincerely universal “reconciliation,” without (in Freud’s formula) “submission to God and Tsar”? It would be a tall order to dispel all of these frequent biographical cliché, yet the Karamazov sequel seems to lead insistently in that direction.4 So in conclusion and indeed throughout we offer some opinions on theauthor’s motivation in his great finale, because the materials require it.

All readers of ^ The Brothers Karamazov are insistently alerted to a forthcoming sequel by Dostoevsky’s preface (“From the Author”), published with the first installment of the novel on February 1, 1879. The preface is in fact devoted wholly to the sequel.5 The main hero will be Alesha Karamazov, as yet “a figureundefined in society,” “ strange and even eccentric,” but “bearing within him, perhaps, the very essence of the whole epoch.” The author claims to have “one life story, but two novels” – the first set thirteen years earlier (1866), the second “in our present moment,” ca. 1880, adjusting to the date of the first novel’s complete edition, December 1st of that year. Dostoevsky ends these remarks withcunning obfuscation, archly promising critics who would read both novels “an essential unity of the whole.” On the face of it and until recently, one might suppose he is pulling the reader’s leg.6 But now the evidence is at hand not only to reconstruct the plot of the Karamazov sequel, but also seriously to argue its essential unity with the novel famous in world literature.

The pivotal source...