Alyosha Karamazov was one with the ground, kissing the Earth as he wept. Alyosha represents an important moral compass for the Karamazov family, in relation to the rash, animalistic Dmitri and the atheistic Ivan. Mirroring the spiritual journey of his author, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alyosha creates a framework of Christian existentialism, guiding his brothers through the suggested process of atonement and forgiveness. Through the works of Dostoevsky, S.L. Frank and Soren Kierkegaard, the essay that follows will examine the lives and actions of the Karamazov family through a Christian existentialist lens. Alyosha experiences virtue as otherworldly grace as he transitions from a cloistered monastic to a life among the mortals spreading the Word of God. While man is said to have been created in the image of God, Konstantin Mochulsky suggests that Dostoevsky lent aspects of himself to each of the Karamazovs. Dostoevsky carefully illuminates the traits of each character separately, therefore mirroring his own spiritual journey and sense of existentialism.
Dmitri Karamazov shuddered at the thought, a hastened attempt at stemming the tide billowing from the servant Grigory’s head proving unsuccessful. This scene from the Brothers Karamazov best encapsulates the rash, too-decisive Dmitri. Prior to harboring patricidal ideation, Dmitri is the outcast of the Karamazov family. Tossed aside by his father, Fyodor, in favor of seedy activity, Dmitri comes to live an existence similar to that of Sigmund Freud’s “fort-da” game. Although rather than Dmitri’s father reeling him back into the family, Fyodor places Dmitri in the lousy care of his servant, Grigory, foreshadowing the near-death act later in the novel. While his brothers find a religious center or a twisted sense of peace in rejecting spirituality in the name of illogical suffering, Dmitri is left on the fringes to wander aimlessly without a true purpose. As Dostoevsky was forming his worldview at a young age, he experienced the loss of a parent, not through the sense of reckless abandonment a la Dmitri Karamazov but through his mother’s death from tuberculosis. The period that immediately followed was one of growing discontent in a young man searching for a purpose including an ill-fated jaunt to military engineering school. As Konstantin Mochulsky writes, “Dostoevsky’s life at school became more agonizing with each passing day.” (Mochulsky, 18) Unable to realize what had become his inner sense of full potential, with a dead father living vicariously through him, Dostoevsky needed an escape. Much like Dmitri Karamazov, the writer was succumbing to his father’s shadow.