Panspermia and the Golden Age in The Brothers Karamazov: Reading Beyond the Religious Paradigm

This article, finding that the religious paradigm tends to eclipse much of the artistry in The Brothers Karamazov, explores the novel through science and philosophy for Zosima's "Sermons" and for Ivan's hallucination of the Devil. It finds that the panspermia theory ("seeds everywhere"), endorsed by William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and Hermann von Helmholtz in the 1870s, can best explain Zosima's belief that God planted "seeds from other worlds" on earth (revising both Scripture and Darwinism) and that panspermia, the transportation of cosmic seeds by comets and asteroids, is crucial in the Devil's discourse to Ivan on palingenesis (eternal recurrence) and evolution. This "repetition" of planet Earth in Ivan's hallucination links it to "The Dream of the Ridiculous Man", a scientific narrative of a "twin" of Earth still in its Golden Age of social harmony. The Golden Age, Dostoevsky's symbol for utopian socialism, is an inherent theme in The Brothers Karamazov through metaphor and metonymy: in Zosima's creed of the "earthly paradise", which Alyosha senses in his "Cana of Galilee" epiphany; in Dmitry's recitations of the poetry of Schiller; and in Ivan's allusions to the Garden of Eden, a literary metaphor for the Golden Age. The final section outlines the response to the novel of the young neurophysiologist Ivan Pavlov in 1880-81, an insightful perspective on its socialist tendency.