turning the paige

ivan karamazov

& the tenderness of youth

On twenty-three-year-old greenness

Upon reading The Brothers Karamazov again, I realized that Ivan Karamazov and I are in the same year of life. Ivan Karamazov and I are both trying to manage the expectations, freedoms, constraints and boundaries of being twenty-three years old. Although I have plenty of thoughts on Ivan Karamazov’s depth of character and the unrelenting oscillations of his mind and beliefs, perhaps I will save them for a later date. In truth, the coincidence of Ivan and I being the same age is what really drew me to young adulthood as a topic of enthusiasm and interest. Because when I read passages spoken by Ivan, I am taken aback by the prose and firmness of his convictions. Obviously, we can look to The Grand Inquisitor for some of Ivan’s most prolific and heartwrenching poetry, but where else do we see such unshakable spirit? Where do we see that illogical hope in the face of all that is rational and real that is so essential to being human? 

We see it everywhere! I believe this is critical to Ivan’s character and is part of why I adore him so much. I find so much of myself and my peers in him. It is really helpful to me to take my character of interest and break them down to their most foundational question or struggle. With Ivan, I believe that he is tormented by what he wants to be true and what he is discovering, every day, to be true. This is not to take away from any of his intelligence, beautiful prose and storytelling, or certitude, but to bring to attention that no man is unshakable. 

I have learned through my failures and successes that it is imperative to understand that I am as shakable or unshakable as I allow myself to be. I find myself being irrationally hopeful, despite what I may read in the news, despite an economy on a downward spiral. I find respite in hope, despite the monstrous obstacles in the way of financial, social, and spiritual freedoms seemingly directed at the young and the poor. Here is a quote from the chapter The Brothers Get Acquainted that I believe encapsulates this sort of rapturous, all-encompassing, full-bodied-feeling of inextinguishable love for one’s life. Ivan shows us here that it is actually quite daring, quite rebellious to love one’s life fervently. 

“But until my thirtieth year, I know this for certain, my youth will overcome everything–all disillusionment, all aversion to life. I’ve asked myself many times: is there any such despair in the world as could overcome this wild and perhaps indecent thirst for life in me, and have decided that apparently there is not– no more, so it seems to me. Some snot-nosed, consumptive moralists, poets especially, often call this thirst for life base. True, it’s a feature of the Karamazovs, to some extent, this thirst for life despite all; it must be sitting in you, too; but why is it base? There is still an awful lot of centripetal force on our planet, Alyosha. I want to live, and I do live, even if it be against logic.”

He is beautifully explaining his rebellion of spirit, the very same rebellion of spirit that I try (and most of the time fail) to find in myself, each and every day. There is something so freeing about being so gleefully appreciative of the ground under your feet, the sky above, and the fishes in the water. In this spectacularised, grossly over-produced world we find ourselves in, it is a form of rebellion simply to have gratitude. 

But I believe the young person’s struggle, much like Ivan’s, is to balance this gratitude, this thirst for life, with the burden of justice and relentless feelings of guilt and responsibility to ensure the existence of a better outcome for our world. My struggle, in particular, is of this same rebellion of spirit. I feel as though I am grateful for the clouds, the food I get to eat, the “sticky little leaves that come out in the spring”, and then in this same breath, I look outside my car window and am overcome by disgust. I am disgusted, confused, and angry at the world. I hear and witness atrocities, big and small, obvious and not-so-obvious, in my own hometown and across the world, and I clench my fists or sob in anger. Perhaps not even at the atrocities themselves, but at my own futility and helplessness. And we are made to feel guilty. Guilt is a defining feeling of personhood for twenty-something-year-olds. 

This, I believe, is the twenty-three-year-old paradox. Big enough to make your own decisions, big enough to pay the bills, big enough to feel guilty about the world’s cruelties; yet not big enough to save the world. Not big enough to answer the questions. This is why I have chosen Ivan as my character of interest. I believe (in my own self-interested sort of way) that it is essential that Ivan is twenty-three. I love him, and see myself in him and he in myself. He is so full of disgust and rage, and I believe most importantly, fear. I read his wide, swathing passages discussing God and sin and freedom and though I am deeply impacted by his prose and intellect, the thing I empathize with most, is his fear. Besides the grandiosity of his speeches and the passion behind them, he is a scared twenty-three-year-old. This is what I love most about him, because he is me and he is us. We have passions, we have thoughts and strong beliefs, but we are also afraid. I am so afraid, just like Ivan, that I will never have all the answers. This is my monomania. It is both the thing that drives me, and the thing that I believe holds me back the most. There is something so comically cruel about not having all the answers, as it is both the thing that keeps me up at night, and also the thing that brings me the most comfort; as if I know that I will never have all the answers, is it really worth the stress and brainpower spent on trying to ‘figure it out’? Yeah. I really think it is. Like Ivan, we all simultaneously have everything to lose and nothing to lose; which is a confusing and awful paradox. We have everything to lose in terms of our spirit, our faith in the world being ripped from us; losing our greenness. We have nothing to lose in the fact that none of our stress is all that consequential, and we can find comfort in the fact that no one actually cares all that much. 

 I really do think that many of my peers, my friends, relatives, feel similarly. And of course, this is not an experience unique to people in their twenties, but I will make the argument that this fear, this guilt, these burdens fall heavily on this specific age group throughout time. I say this because I am living it. I experience, day in and day out, in our year 2025, the complexities of living here and now; and evidently, they are not so different from the complexities of living in 1866, at least on a spiritual level. This is the most strikingly wonderful thing about reading Dostoyevsky, to me; his tantalizing modernity speaks to the reader in such a way that we could be having a conversation at the dinner table. He could be pulling the thoughts out of his reader’s mind as they were being formulated. It is an incredible thing to experience, and yes, I am eternally grateful that his works have been preserved and produced for all of us to share. 

As an aside, let me also clarify that I am not insinuating that this fear makes a character like Ivan weak. This is not a cowardly, shrinking fear. This is a fear that will loom in the shadows, perhaps for one’s entire life. This fear is one that will consume you like a great beast, if you let it. This brings us back to what I said a few paragraphs ago, about Ivan being driven mad by what he wants (so desperately!) to be true and what he is discovering to be true. His fear is what gives him his characteristic cynicism, his “coldly rational” nature. If I may be overly optimistic, I really do believe that Ivan is the most tender-hearted and well-intentioned of the three brothers. And I understand that that is an uncommon or uncomfortable assertion, given that Dostoyevsky himself has dubbed Alexei as his “hero” and his angel, but in my interpretation, at least, Ivan is just trying so hard. It would be unfair and unjust to say that all I see him as is a scared and timid little boy, but I believe that in moments, he really is just so. There is just so much uncertainty, so much distress beneath his words that it makes me full of distress and uncertainty! For me, reading Ivan’s great dialogues is like looking into one of those warped mirrors in a funhouse (distressing!). 

But that was a bit of a downer. I really do not mean to add fuel to the flame of the cyclical nature of guilt, stress, responsibility, and despair. All in all, I really do look to Ivan as a beacon of hope (even despite his downward spiral and subsequent madness, but perhaps that is another post for another day). What actually started this whole idea for this post was one short phrase of a conversation between Alyosha and Ivan. 

“I have been thinking to myself about just that, my twenty-three-year-old-greenness.”

In the face of all creatures of misery, in the face of all attackers of our collective spirit, despite my own moments of despair and anguish, I choose to preserve my twenty-three-year-old-greenness. It is rebellious yet it is precious in itself, to love life, to love despite how illogical and irrational it may be. This is my want for all those who find themselves in a character like Ivan, or even Alyosha or Dmitri… or even Fyodor. I understand I am swinging the pendulum wildly now, but this notion brings me to one of my all time favorite quotes by Marcus Aurelius. 

“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?” Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

Because here, Marcus is not simply talking about getting up to labor in terms of going to your job, he is also describing mental fortitude. Because no one said any of this was easy. No one says that choosing to question, choosing to work and love was easy (look at what happens to Ivan in the latter half of the novel). Loving may perhaps be the hardest thing of all, this is one central message of The Brothers Karamazov (again, another topic for another day). Huddling under the blankets is the easy thing, choosing every day to love without fail, to turn your cheek to the guilt that is unjustly being placed upon you is the hard thing. Grappling with your fears, both physical and spiritual takes work and is perhaps the monolith that most people are never able to conquer, but that is not to say that we shouldn’t try. Safeguarding, our twenty-three-year-old-greenness, our thirty-three-year-old-greenness, our eighty-three-year-old-greenness, is the hard thing, but at least we can look ourselves in the mirror at the end of the day and say that we tried to conquer these beasts. 

All those who try in desperation to find the answers, to conquer their own despair are of gentle heart, even if they are troubled. I’d like to end with a quote from the elder Zosima, as told by Alexei in the chapter From Talks and Homilies of the Elder Zosima, that will perhaps wrap up this post and open another. 

“Fathers and teachers, I ask myself: “What is hell?” And I answer thus: “The suffering of being no longer able to love.”

All quotes from The Brothers Karamazov have been quoted from my copy of the book (bicentennial edition – Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation)

2021 Paperback ISBN: 978-1-250-78845-0