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Paradox
Explanation and Analysis—Hatred and Love:
Speaking frankly about his past to Alexei, Dmitri uses a number of paradoxes when describing a scene in which the proud Katerina Ivanovna is forced to come to him and ask for money in order to spare her father from legal difficulties:
I looked at any woman, not a single one, with hatred—see, I’m making the sign of the cross—but I looked at this one for three or five seconds, then, with terrible hatred—the kind of hatred that is only a hairsbreadth from love, the maddest love! I went to the window, leaned my forehead on the frozen glass, and I remember that the ice burned my forehead like fire. I didn’t keep her long, don’t worry; I turned around, went to the table, opened the drawer and took out a five percent bank note for five thousand roubles, with no name filled in.
Here, he paradoxically claims that his “terrible hatred” is “only a hairsbreadth from love.” This combination of volatile and contradictory emotions is typical of Dmitri, and of the Karamazov men in general. His desire for Katerina is strong precisely because he resents her and her feelings of superiority. Further contributing to the paradoxical tone of this passage, he claims that, as he placed his forehead against the “frozen glass,” the ice “burned” his forehead “like fire.” This paradoxical notion of ice that burns reflects his own conflicted response to Katerina.
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