Smierdiakowa droga do samobójstwa – "Bracia Karamazow" Fiodora Dostojewskiego
The Smerdyakov’s road to suicide – "The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Author(s): Mirosława Michalska-Suchanek
Subject(s): Cultural history
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Smerdyakov; The Brothers Karamazov; Fyodor Dostoevsky; suicide
Summary/Abstract: This article attempts to analyse the path to suicide of one of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s more important suicide heroes – Smerdyakov from the novel "The Brothers Karamazov". This path is understood as a combination of the protagonist’s background, his characterological and personal traits, as well as dynamically growing circumstances and conditions. All these factors, stretched over time, entailed the final solution, i.e. death by suicide. Underneath the mask of an ill-advised, simple-minded epileptic, hid a person who was intelligent, reasoning logically and, at the same time, clever and cynical. His developed self-consciousness became his enemy, causing his opposition to the world to evolve into a complete negation of it. Hatred and anger were – in his view – the antidote to offended pride. The stigma of his origins that haunted him gave rise to a desire to take revenge on those to whom fate had granted a better life. Humiliation and shame became a driving force that was impossible to tame. He was able and willing to use even his own suicidal death as a weapon against those he hated. Smerdyakov also proved to be the perfect soil in which to germinate the seeds of the ideology preached by Ivan Karamazov, who, proclaiming that in the absence of God there is no morality and everything is permitted, maneuvered Smerdyakov with a vision of absolute freedom, giving permission for arbitrariness. The hero, eager for revenge on the Karamazov family, succumbed to the idea (exploited it?), bringing Ivan’s extreme ethical rationalism ad absurdum.

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