Dostoevsky (185 page)

The adolescent Ilyusha will later, along with his classmates, allow Dostoevsky to fulfill his long-cherished desire to depict the relation between a charismatic Christian figure and a group of children. The scene in which Alyosha visits the miserable hovel of the Snegiryovs, entitled “Laceration in the Cottage,” is placed immediately after Katerina Ivanovna’s “Laceration in the Drawing-Room.” The laceration in the drawing room is the result of self-will and pride, which perverts suffering into an instrument of domination; the laceration in the cottage, when the captain hysterically tramples on the badly needed money offered by Alyosha, is a pathetic effort to maintain a last, remaining shred of self-respect and to justify Ilyusha’s desperate faith in his father’s honor and dignity.

By the time he completed Book 4, Dostoevsky had presented all his characters, clearly indicated the future course of the main plot action, and raised his primary ideological issue of reason and faith in a fascinating variety of scenes and characters. In Books 5, 6, and 7, this theme comes to the foreground and is treated directly in some of the greatest pages in the history of the novel.

¹
For an impressive “poetic” reading of the novel, which tries to do justice to this dense web of references, parallels, and figural anticipations, see Diane O. Thompson,
The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory
(Cambridge, UK, 1991).

²
V. E. Vetlovskaya,
Poetika romana “Brat’ya Karamazovy”
(Leningrad, 1977), chap. 1.

³
Ibid.

⁴
Robin Feuer Miller,
The Brothers Karamazov
(New York, 1992), 23.

⁵
The “prime candidate” here (Garnett-Matlaw translation) renders
peredovoe myaso
in the Russian text, which Victor Terras translates literally as “progressive flesh” in his indispensable, almost line-by-line commentary on
The Brothers Karamazov
. Terras also offers “cannonfodder of progress” as an alternative. The adjective
peredovoe
(progressive) is what gives the phrase a specific social-political meaning. See Victor Terras,
A Karamazov Companion
(Madison, WI, 1984), 181.

The two set pieces of Book 5, Ivan’s “rebellion” and the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, reach ideological heights for which there are few equals. In the nineteenth century one can think only perhaps of Balzac’s
Seraphita
and
Louis Lambert
, George Sand’s
Spiridion
, or possibly Flaubert’s
La tentation de Saint Antoine
. These inspired pages take their place in a Western literary tradition that begins with Aeschylus’s
Prometheus Bound
and the book of Job. They also continue the Romantic titanism of the first half of the nineteenth century, represented by such writers as Goethe, Leopardi, Byron, and Shelley. The Czech critic Vaclav Cerny, in a penetrating book, saw Dostoevsky (along with Nietzsche) as the culmination of this Romantic tradition of protest against God on behalf of a suffering humanity.
¹

Formally, the three chapters devoted to Ivan illustrate again that sudden vertical expansion of a character that enlarges his symbolic status and poetic power. Now the coldly conceptual Ivan is consumed by the same passionate thirst for life as Dimitry. Alyosha tells him affectionately during their conversation in the tavern, “You are just a young and fresh nice boy, green in fact!” “It’s a feature of the Karamazovs, it’s true,” Ivan replies, “that thirst for life regardless of everything, you have it no doubt too, but why is it base?” Of course it can become so, as in old Feodor or Dimitry’s escapades, but it can be a life-sustaining force as well. As Ivan acknowledges, “even if I . . . lost faith in the order of things, were convinced in fact that everything is a disorderly, damnable and perhaps devil-ridden chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man’s disillusionment—still I would want to live, and, having once tasted of the cup, I would not turn away from it till I had drained it.” This loss of faith “in the order of things” is exactly what torments Ivan, but his primordial love for life is powerful enough to counteract the dispiriting conclusions of his reason: “I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic” (14: 209).

Enumerating all the endearments that still link him to life, he lists not only nature (“I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring, I love the blue sky”)
but also “the previous graveyard” of European civilization, filled with the glories of the past, before which he “shall fall to the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them.” Such thoughts and actions may be totally irrational, but “it’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s insides, with one’s guts.” This capacity for an irrational love, whether of nature or the monuments of culture, is the first step toward an understanding of the meaning of life; for such understanding is possible only when the ego is taken beyond itself. To Ivan’s question whether we should “love life more than the meaning of it,” Alyosha replies: “Certainly, love it regardless of logic as you say, . . . and it’s only then one can understand the meaning of it.” But because Ivan’s “logic” had already concluded that life has no meaning, he predicts that when “I am thirty . . . I shall begin to turn aside from the cup, even if I have not emptied it” (14: 209–210). Such words raise the specter of a suicide out of despair, but the emphasis on Ivan’s youthfulness and his “longing for life” hold out hope of other possibilities.

This friendly encounter of the two brothers is placed in the foreground of
Chapter 3
, but the shadow of an archetypal murder lurks in the background and has already been suggested. Questioned about Dimitry’s whereabouts, Smerdyakov had answered “superciliously”: “How am I to know. . . . It’s not as if I were his keeper.” A few pages later, after learning about Ivan’s imminent departure, Alyosha anxiously asks about the quarrel between Dimitry and their father: “How will it end?” And Ivan irritably snaps back, “What have I to do with it? Am I my brother Dimitry’s keeper?” Then he suddenly smiles “bitterly”: “Cain’s answer to God about his murdered brother—wasn’t it. Perhaps that’s what you’re thinking at this moment?” (14: 206, 211). Both Ivan and Smerdyakov, who echo each other’s thoughts, are thus linked with the murder motif by this biblical reference, which also intimates their subterranean connection.

As the conversation between the two brothers continues, Ivan vehemently challenges Alyosha’s devotion to Zosima’s world of all-embracing forgiveness and overflowing, selfless love. Ivan is struggling inwardly against his own yearning to accept the very worldview he is attacking with such passion. He half admits to himself, “quite like a little gentle child,” that he does not “want to corrupt you [Alyosha], or to turn you from your stronghold, perhaps I want to be healed by you,” but this moment of reassuring tenderness is soon swept away (14: 215). Ivan introduces his famous distinction between “Euclidean” (earthly) and “non-Euclidean” (supernatural) understanding, insisting that, although he is perfectly willing to accept the existence of this non-Euclidean world (and hence of God), his Euclidean understanding refuses to reconcile itself to all the moral horrors of the world created by such a divinity.

Since Ivan does not believe in God as more than a hypothesis, his opinion on this point reflects the same ambiguity that marked his article on church jurisdiction. “As for me,” he says, “I’ve long resolved not to think of whether man created
God or God man.” Such a question is “utterly inappropriate for a mind created with an idea of only three dimensions” (and hence Euclidean). Ivan remains neutral on this issue, though perfectly willing to accept all the sublime consequences that flow from postulating the existence of God. Paraphrasing the Gospel of Saint John, he declares, both with deep feeling and a touch of irony: “I believe in the underlying order and the meaning of life; I believe in the eternal harmony in which they say we shall one day be blended. I believe in the Word to Which the entire universe is striving, and Which Itself was ‘with God,’ and Which Itself is God, and so on, and so on, to infinity” (14: 214). But to profess these beliefs as more than hypotheses would mean possessing a faith that transcends reason—a faith that Ivan is not only unable but also morally unwilling to muster even if he could manage to do so. What he desires is that such ecstatic expectations should justify themselves before the bar of his Euclidean understanding, of his earthly reason—and this, obviously, they cannot do.

The dialogue between Ivan and Alyosha serves as a prelude to the chapter “Rebellion,” an attack on God and the world he created so powerful that many critics have doubted whether the book as a whole succeeds in overcoming its subversive impact. Dostoevsky made some effort, however, to moderate the disquieting effects of his deeply moving jeremiad even before composing its “refutation” in Book 6. For Ivan begins by exhibiting his emotional incapacity to experience the fundamental act of Christian fellow-feeling, that of loving one’s neighbor. “I could never understand,” he says, “how one could love one’s neighbors . . . though one might love them at a distance.” Citing an extreme and repulsive example of self-sacrificial Christian love from Flaubert’s
La légende de Saint Julien l’hospitalier
(the embrace by the saint of a frozen beggar with some loathsome disease), Ivan sees it only as “a love imposed by duty, as a penance,” similar to Katerina’s “love” for Dimitry. It is an act accomplished “from the laceration of falsity” rather than from a sincerely spontaneous response to human suffering (14: 215–216). For Ivan, the precepts of Christianity thus become transformed into a duty and obligation contrary to human nature. Ivan’s feverishly overstrained compassion for humanity that follows is thus undermined by the suspicion that he may also be experiencing only a “laceration of falsity.”

The details of Ivan’s searing indictment of God unroll a catalogue of atrocities that Dostoevsky drew from many sources—court cases, barbarities reported about the Russo-Turkish War, a pamphlet distributed by an aristocratic Christian sect describing the edifying conversion of a criminal in Geneva just before his execution—which did not for a moment stop his being put to death. Ivan dwells particularly on the torture inflicted on helpless and innocent children, and does so with a morbid delectation that makes Alyosha distinctly uneasy;
there are indications that Ivan’s fascination with human evil has begun to unbalance his mental equilibrium (he speaks “as though in delirium”). Humanity has become for Ivan nothing but a creator of destruction and darkness, an image not of God but of the devil. “I think if the devil doesn’t exist,” he tells Alyosha, “and therefore was created by man, he has created him in his own image and likeness” (14: 215–218).

It is the existence of all this suffering and misery in the world that Ivan finds emotionally unendurable and intellectually incomprehensible. At the very least, sinful adults might be made to pay a price. But how is one to accept the idea of original sin—the idea that children must suffer for the sins of their fathers? For Ivan, “such a truth . . . is incomprehensible for the heart of man here on earth. The innocent must not suffer for another’s sins, and especially such innocents!” Dostoevsky even allows Ivan to reject in advance the position from which he will be opposed. “Do you understand why this infamy must be permitted?” he shouts at Alyosha. “Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he have known that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much?” (14: 218–220). The force of Ivan’s argument is adroitly countered by the adjective “diabolical,” which reveals the implicitly Manichean premise of his indignation, his conviction that humans can use freedom
only
to accomplish evil.

Ivan’s tortured cogitations reject the very idea of “a universal harmony” in the future as something monstrous and unjust. With bitter irony, he declares that he can well envisage how glorious it would be “when the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, ‘Thou art just, O Lord.’ ” He can understand this sublime apotheosis, but he cannot accept it: “It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who . . . prayed in the stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears, to ‘dear, kind God!’ ” Nobody, Ivan argues, has the right to forgive her torturer. “I don’t want harmony. From love for humanity, I don’t want it. I would rather be left with unavenged suffering . . . 
even if I were wrong
” (14: 223). The intensity of Ivan’s conflict between his desire for “rational” retributive justice, on the one hand, and the sublimity of universal forgiveness, on the other, is revealed by Dostoevsky’s underlining. Nonetheless, Ivan is unyielding in his refusal, which culminates in his famous declaration: “And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I must give it back as soon as possible. . . . It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him my ticket” (the ticket to a world of non-Euclidean eternal harmony that would redeem all suffering in the Euclidean realm) (14: 223).