The Covert Design ofThe Brothers Karamazov:Alesha's Pathology and Dialectic

Abstract

A future revolutionary, Alesha Karamazov is, at nineteen, an inexperienced boy who lives in a monastery and who has been considered strange since birth. Fedor Dostoevskii endows him with hysteria—then a serious psychopathology with convulsions that were clinically seen as analogous to epilepsy, the morbus sacer from which Dostoevskii himself suffered. Recognized as an epidemic problem, hysteria in this novel is elaborately deployed as a symbol of Russia's social ills and the underlying cause of farreaching personality changes in Alesha (for better or worse), preparing him for a heroic destiny. Although hysteria was soon altered and later eliminated as a clinical syndrome, James L. Rice enables us to read the novel for the first time in the light of documented medical history.