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You will see that this is only one perspective of his when you read the book. All the brothers represents his existential struggle and their father is named Fyodor. The Grand Inquisitor is one of my favorite parts. It is about the empire (the iron prison) and about noble but failed reasons for control (processed through my filters).

Where you see politics I see him describing something deeper. This is not a defense for communism, but about freedom and the burden of freedom.

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Raskolnikov holds that by a law of nature men have been "somewhat arbitrarily" divided into two groups--ordinary and extraordinary. Raskolnikov believe that the duty and vocation of the first group is to be servile, the material out of which the world and society is to be formed. The first group are the people of the present, the now. The second group, those who are extraordinary, are a step above the normal, ordinary curs. They have the ability to overstep normal bounds and transgress the rights of those who are simply ordinary. They are the prime movers--they have a right to transcend normal societal strictures to accomplish those things they have determined are valid in their conscience. Extraordinary men are the prime movers. He cites such extraordinary men as Newton, Mahomet, and Napoleon. He tells us that Newton had the right to kill hundreds of men if need be in order to bring to the world knowledge of his findings. Napoleon and other leaders created a new word. They overturned ancient laws and created new ones. They had the right to uphold their new ideal, even if it meant killing innocent men defending the ancient law. "The first class of people preserve and people the world, the second move the world and lead it to its goal." Despite these tremendous differences in his theory, and the obvious superiority that the extraordinary people are afforded, Raskolnikov maintains that both classes have an equal right to exist. This is interesting, and anyone who sees tremendous problems with this theory must realize this very important point--both classes of men and women are necessary to understand the true meaning of Raskolnikov's theory.

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SOME of my readers may imagine that my young man was a sickly,
ecstatic, poorly developed creature, a pale, consumptive dreamer. On
the contrary, Alyosha was at this time a well-grown, red-cheeked,
clear-eyed lad of nineteen, radiant with health. He was very handsome,
too, graceful, moderately tall, with hair of a dark brown, with a
regular, rather long, oval-shaped face, and wide-set dark grey,
shining eyes; he was very thoughtful, and apparently very serene. I
shall be told, perhaps, that red cheeks are not incompatible with
fanaticism and mysticism; but I fancy that Alyosha was more of a
realist than anyone.

Oh! no doubt, in the monastery he fully
believed in miracles, but, to my thinking, miracles are never a
stumbling-block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose
realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever,
will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous,
and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would
rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he
admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognised
by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but
the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound
by his very realism to admit the miraculous also. The Apostle Thomas
said that he would not believe till he saw, but when he did see he
said, "My Lord and my God!" Was it the miracle forced him to
believe? Most likely not, but he believed solely because he desired to
believe and possibly he fully believed in his secret heart even when
he said, "I do not believe till I see."


    I shall be told, perhaps, that Alyosha was stupid, undeveloped,
had not finished his studies, and so on. That he did not finish his
studies is true, but to say that he was stupid or dull would be a
great injustice. I'll simply repeat what I have said above. He entered
upon this path only because, at that time, it alone struck his
imagination and presented itself to him as offering an ideal means
of escape for his soul from darkness to light.

Add to that that he was to some extent a youth of our last epoch- that is, honest in nature,
desiring the truth, seeking for it and believing in it, and seeking to
serve it at once with all the strength of his soul, seeking for
immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, life itself,
for it. Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that the
sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices,
and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their
seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply
tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have
set before them as their goal such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the
strength of many of them.

The path Alyosha chose was a path going in
the opposite direction, but he chose it with the same thirst for swift
achievement. As soon as he reflected seriously he was convinced of the
existence of God and immortality, and at once he instinctively said to
himself: "I want to live for immortality, and I will accept no
compromise." In the same way, if he had decided that God and
immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and
a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labour question, it is
before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form
taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built
without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on
earth. Alyosha would have found it strange and impossible to go on
living as before. It is written: "Give all that thou hast to the
poor and follow Me, if thou wouldst be perfect."

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