Robin F Miller

December 7th, 1912 marks the 100th birthday of my father, Lewis Samuel Feuer. That date was to play an important role in his subsequent biography, about which I plan to write in a different context: his friendship and decades long correspondence with the eminent Japanese sociologist, Kazuko Tsurumi who died several years after my father. My task here is to put forward a few reminiscences of my father, reminiscences which I hope will be general enough that they will not be cloying or sentimental or cast a pall over the open-ended kind of inquiry offered by the essays in this symposium.

(Note that I omit the narrator-chronicler from this list of those who engage in such friendly persuasions, but I would include Ivan's devil among their list, although his particular methods of persuasion differ radically from others since he engages in the practice of a kind of metaphysical homeopathy.) This chapter will focus on several moments in The Brothers Karamazov where the tactics of persuasion toward belief seem not so friendly but rather authoritarian and even harsh. [...]on these occasions Zosima's important adage, 'Everything is connected', does not seem to apply neatly to the novel's narrative structure and its interlocking meanings in which so much, following the Zo sima rule, is connected to so much else. The answer to that would most likely be in the affirmative.) Moreover, God whether in divine conversation with Mary, Jesus or the devil, appears in the company of others, as the head of a 'divine assembly', which, though common both to Eastern and Western forms of the Judeo -Christian tradition, is 'a feature of early Near Eastern theology encountered in Mesopotamian literature and in the Ugaritic mythological texts'.19 (It is not clear whether the guardian angel in Grushenka's fable converses alone with God when he pleads the case of the old woman, although her tale had made mention of the presence of devils.) In short, from a literary standpoint, although The Brothers Karamazov offers passionate, closely interwoven arguments for why one should have faith in God above all else, the God who actually appears as a character within its pages is dialogic without being open-minded, and sometimes capable of forgetting - whether it be the sinners at the bottom of the lake of hell or our character Smerdiakov. [...]he appears, not alone nor in private communion with a particular believer, but amidst his divine assemblies or at least with a guardian angel.