You will see heaven, if you try to love.
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Like the strangers that you’ve met
The ragged men in ragged clothes
The silver thorn, a bloody rose
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow
Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they’re not listening still
Perhaps they never will
Vincent (Starry Starry Night), Don McLean
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1879 novel The Brothers Karamazov tells the story of Alyosha Karamazov. He is the youngest of the three Karamazov brothers and the most religious of the trio. Alyosha is generous, compassionate, and kind – a novice at the local monastery. Alyosha's tragedy lies in his inability to save others from suffering.
Last year, I portrayed Alyosha Karamazov in an on-ice performance during the Princeton Holiday Show. I’d like to tell you a bit about what it meant to me.
For seventeen years, I’ve been a figure skater. Competitively until right before Princeton, when I retired due to a back injury and moved onto the next chapter. Now, I skate for fun at the Baker Rink when creative inspiration strikes. From ages three to seven, I was a half-conscious child stumbling across the ice during winter Learn-To-Skate session. From seven to nine, I begged my parents to set up more private lessons with a coach at the local rink so I could learn my proper jumps and spins. At sixteen, I became a national champion at the novice level, competed at Junior Nationals, and qualified as a Team USA athlete.
Skating was my first love. She taught me almost everything, as first loves tend to.
The sport’s judging is divided into two parts: the Technical Score and Component Score. Tech is calculated with point values accrued through a set of elements like jumps, spins, and step sequences, where raw difficulty and quality of execution are judged. Components are your presentation and artistry. Judges assess skating skills, performance, choreography, and overall impression. Together, your total score decides your competitive placement.
The technical metric in skating is essentially a single factor: the number of airborne revolutions you can reliably complete and stick the landing for. My old friend and current Men’s world champion Ilia Malinin is the world’s best because he uniquely can land a quadruple axel in international competition, 4.5 revolutions. The quad axel is worth 12.5 points over the triple axel’s 8.0 – you can imagine how jumping ability tracks with a skater’s technical ceiling. To be competitive at the top three levels (senior, junior, novice), genuine proficiency in triple jumps is necessary, making elite figure skating an incredibly small, generally meritocratic, physically demanding world, both nationally and globally.
In the decade of my competitive career, I became obsessed with becoming the world’s most extraordinary technician. I couldn’t fully control artistic impression, but I could learn the jumps to force my technical base value far above competitors. I read every line of the International Judging System (IJS) rulebook. I memorized every point value until I could play out entire competitive scenarios and calculate point outcomes in my head before slumber.
At thirteen, despite years of trying, I just could not fully rotate my double axel – a jump of 2.5 revolutions which is usually the bottleneck for unlocking the ability to rotate triples. On a whim, I switched coaches, switched rinks, and within two months landed both my double axel and first triple, the triple salchow. A year later, I could do every triple and a solid triple-triple as a high school freshman.
Two years after that, I was competing on the national circuit as a novice. Equipped proudly with my hard earned, consistent triple lutz + triple toe and triple flip + triple salchow (together 20.2 points base + 5.0 bonus points in novices for being gutsy), I transformed from an unknown midwesterner with abysmal potential to the 2021 National Champion. Years of meticulously honing my triples raised my best total score from 80 before a double axel to 157. With a new set of difficulty-incentivizing bonus point rules, I reasoned my way through some logical-mathematical loopholes and gamed the system to squeeze out every point until my component score hardly mattered at all. My 157 was upheld by 14 bonus points from pure technical difficulty. I walked into the locker room after that skate and competitors softly accused me of score manipulation after seeing the excess values on my score sheet. And wow, did it feel good to show up to every competition knowing they could score my artistry however they liked. They could do their worst. But they couldn’t deny me the points from my triple-triples. It was misguided, narrowminded, immature even, to see the sport with such spite. But at sixteen, I told myself artistry was pointless, subjective, and secondary – I became a notable athlete off the technical skill I built with every 6 AM wakeup. No one could take that away from me. No one could unsee the clean revolutions I pulled off, the landings I stuck on cold, slippery ice. No one could deny a true technician’s arsenal.
How, then, could I find meaning in skating after retirement? These days, I can still do my jumps, but there’s no score, judges, or medals.
As a college freshman, I revisited and skated, in an empty rink, my freeskate program from that storied season to “Vincent (Starry Starry Night)” by Don McClean. The routine that brought me from a lonely rink in Michigan to the Junior National Championships. Check out my epigraph above to see the closing lines, or maybe play it on Spotify as you read.
Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
I choreographed my Starry Starry Night program mostly myself, neglecting to even think about Van Gogh’s life and going solely off musical feeling. It was longing glances to the bleachers, inwards hand brushes against the chest, and gently extended arms as the guitar strums slowed down. As I re-skated the program that once brought me so much, I started to understand why I was so drawn to a song about Van Gogh. He spent his life feeling misunderstood by the world. Art was his salvation.
I spent a decade of my life feeling misunderstood by the dual structure of figure skating itself. Having artistry demanded of me felt unfair, coercive even. Like having to speak in a language I didn’t know. Like playing a game I didn’t agree to enter. Like a fool’s errand.
My salvation, in contrast, was rigor. At sixteen, I reveled in becoming the technician I had always dreamed about. Jumps were all I knew, my pride and joy in life. My triple lutz felt… real: a conglomeration of athletic courage, Newtonian physics, and the adrenaline of defying gravity. She was as beautiful to me as Starry Starry Night is to the world. I believed my technical diligence was sanity, a sanity I suffered for on the canvasses of ice I loved so much.
Now I think I know what my sport tried to say to me.
The choreographic feeling in my Van Gogh program was my plea to be understood and accepted as a technician. At the end of the step sequence, I built a moment where I sink on one foot towards the ice, curl into myself, look down, close my eyes, and cover my ears with strained fists as the music sings the ragged men in ragged clothes. It comes after all the difficult jumps, and at the time, I thought it marked progress on faking expressiveness. But it turned out to express something I experienced to the core. I felt like a ragged technician in a world defined by polish, appearance, and aesthetics. By that point of a freeskate, every second is a plea for the judges to understand what you’ve performed and treat you favorably. In my Van Gogh program, I pleaded to be seen as a precocious athlete with something to offer my sport under the ragged clothes.
I finally grasped why skating was defined by two parts. Movement has feeling, and feeling has meaning.
Amidst technical ascent, I built a freeskate expressing the story of my skating. Now, when I skate my Van Gogh program without the pressure of execution, I feel the full color palette of what skating means to me. Paint your palette blue and gray. Skating is freedom. Creation. Dignity. Love. But before I understood any of it, on national championship ice, I inadvertently portrayed feeling misunderstood. Like Van Gogh was. Absence of feeling catalyzed its creation.
Sophomore fall, I read The Brothers Karamazov, which led to my Alyosha Karamazov performance. I chose “Bring Him Home” from Les Miserables by Josh Groban for the soundtrack. To me, the lyrics evoke the same sense of searching for goodness that Alyosha feels.
Unlike my Van Gogh freeskate, this was the first time I choreographed a program solely for artistic expression. There were no professional stakes to performing in a holiday show, and I didn’t have it in me to do more than one triple salchow at the start. I started the program with a single blade-fueled push forward, eyes following my left hand as I raised it slowly to the sky, like how Alyosha looks to God for salvation. Throughout the program, as Alyosha learns of humanity’s moral quagmire, I moved between upwardness, through my eyes, chest, and arms, and relinquishment through collapsed shoulders, solemn faces, and knees on ice.
Gradually, I started performing more towards not the ceiling (faith) or ice (despair), but to the audience themselves, to embody Alyosha learning goodness through connection with people. The novel closes with Alyosha telling a group of young boys that they will be reunited with a fallen friend in the afterlife. Perhaps they will, perhaps they won’t. Yet for a moment, because of Alyosha’s faith, everything is okay – beautiful, even. At the end, I looked inwards to grapple with suffering once more, stood as my hands made an angel’s wings, and finally, raised my arms towards the audience with open palms.
Alyosha learned not just to despair inwards or hope upwards, but to find meaning in connection with people.
I learned not just to see skating as emotive demand or technical conquerability, but as meaning in completeness. Sixteen years after his first steps on the ice, with outstretched arms and hands of invitation, a skater became whole.
At last, he was technician and artist.