Good Memory

Brothers Karamazov concludes at a gravestone. Twelve boys, Alyosha, a frozen November morning. Ilyusha Snegiryov just buried. And Alyosha saying:

"There is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us."

This comes after 900 pages of Dostoevsky's most sustained argument — Ivan's case that the world cannot be justified, that no final harmony makes up for the suffering of one tortured child. The Grand Inquisitor. The rebellion. The entrance ticket returned. Ivan's argument wins at the logical level, and Dostoevsky knew it. He never tries to refute it. He just ends the book with children's voices at a stone.

What Alyosha is describing is structural, not sentimental. He's not saying: remember the good times and feel warm. He's saying: a good memory is protection against future badness.

"Perhaps we may even grow wicked later on, may be unable to refrain from a bad action, may laugh at men's tears and at those people who say as Kolya did just now, 'I want to suffer for all men,' and may even jeer spitefully at such people. But however bad we may become—which God forbid—yet, when we recall how we buried Ilusha, how we loved him in his last days... the cruelest and most mocking of us—if we do become so—will not dare to laugh inwardly at having been kind and good at this moment."

The claim: even bad men have moments of goodness. Even cynics have had moments of caring. Even the cruelest person at this stone, if they laugh later at what was said here, will hear themselves and stop: "No, I do wrong to laugh."

Memory doesn't prevent badness. It creates a pause. And in the pause there's an option that wasn't available before.

Kolya Krassotkin, the thirteen-year-old who spent two months avoiding Ilyusha out of pride, who finally arrived with the lost dog trained to tricks — who broke down completely at the bedside, who said "I am a beast in lots of ways, Karamazov" — Kolya asks the last question:

"Can it be true what's taught us in religion, that we shall all rise again from the dead and shall live and see each other again, all, Ilusha too?"

Alyosha answers: "Certainly we shall all rise again, certainly we shall see each other and shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that has happened!" — half laughing, half enthusiastic.

Not half-convinced. Half laughing. The laugh is important.

He's not performing certainty he doesn't have. He's not giving a theological proof. He's answering from a place that's already past the question — not resolved it, but moved past the need to resolve it before acting. The resurrection question is still open. The joy is not contingent on its answer.

"Hurrah for Karamazov!" Kolya shouts ecstatically. The boys take it up.

Ivan spent the whole novel trying to think his way to a position. His thought arrived in a room where a shabby, dispirited devil sat on his sofa — his own ideas personified, wearing a threadbare coat three years out of fashion, wanting to become a merchant's wife and light a candle, begging for some materiality, some warmth. "I suffer, but still I don't live. I am x in an indeterminate equation."

Alyosha spent the whole novel doing things. Going to people. Sitting with the dying. Visiting Grushenka. Talking to the boys. Standing at the stone.

His answer to Kolya is half a laugh because the certainty comes from the practice, not from having solved the problem. He doesn't know for certain. He has chosen how to live anyway. That makes the answer simpler than Ivan's answer — not because it's less intelligent, but because it's not contingent on the argument.

The good memory Alyosha is describing is this scene: the stone, the boys, the frozen morning, the dog that came back. He's telling them to remember it.

In thirty years, if they become cynics or cowards or people who laugh at the ones who say they want to suffer for all men — they'll still have this. The moment when they were all here together and loved a dying boy and it was real.

That's not a refutation of Ivan's argument. It's an answer to a different question.

Ivan asked: can the world be justified?

Alyosha is asking: given that you're in it anyway — given the sticky leaves and the blue sky and the morning frost and the children's voices — what do you do with the time?

"Let us go hand in hand."

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