The Karamazov Brothers

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  ‘Only too well, Ivan,’ exclaimed Alyosha, ‘a longing to love instinctively from the depth of one’s being—you put that beautifully, and I’m so happy you have such an urge to live. I think that everyone should, above all else on this earth, love life.’

  ‘Love life rather than the meaning of it?’

  ‘Certainly, it must come before logic, as you said, it must certainly come before logic, for only then can one come to understand the meaning. I’ve thought that for a long time already. You’re half-way there, Ivan, half your task is accomplished; you love life. Now you have to tackle the next half, and then you’re saved.’

  ‘You’re saving me already, though perhaps I was never in danger of perishing! But what is this second half of yours?’

  ‘You have to resurrect your dead, who maybe never died anyway. Come on, let’s have some tea. I’m glad we’re talking, Ivan.’

  ‘I can see you’re feeling optimistic. I love, I really love, these professions de foi* from such… novices. You’re a resolute fellow, Aleksei. Is it true you want to leave the monastery?’

  ‘Yes, it is. My starets is sending me out into the world.’

  ‘So, we’ll meet again out in the world, we’ll meet before that thirtieth year when I begin to tear the cup from my lips. Father, you know, doesn’t want to tear himself from his cup before he’s seventy, he even dreams of keeping it up till he’s eighty, he says so himself; he’s quite serious about it, even if he is an old buffoon. He’s used his sensuality as a rock to cling to, except that… perhaps after thirty there isn’t much else to hold on to… But to persevere till seventy is obscene, it’d be better to give up at thirty; that way one can preserve a modicum of decency while deceiving oneself. You haven’t seen Dmitry today, have you?’

  ‘No, I haven’t, but I saw Smerdyakov,’ and Alyosha gave his brother a rapid but detailed account of his meeting with Smerdyakov. Ivan suddenly began to listen attentively, and even asked him to repeat certain details.

  ‘But he asked me not to tell Dmitry that he’d discussed him,’ added Alyosha.

  Ivan frowned and became pensive.

  ‘Is it because of Smerdyakov that you’re frowning?’ asked Alyosha.

  ‘Yes. To hell with him! It’s Dmitry I really wanted to see, but now it’s no use…’, grunted Ivan.

  ‘Are you really going away so soon, Ivan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what about Dmitry and father? How is it all going to end between them?’ said Alyosha anxiously.

  ‘You’re still harping on about that! What’s it got to do with me? Am I my brother Dmitry’s keeper?’ snapped Ivan irritably, but then he suddenly smiled somewhat bitterly. ‘Cain’s answer to God about his murdered brother, eh? Perhaps that’s what you’re thinking at this moment? But dammit, I really can’t be expected to stay here to watch over them, can I? I’ve finished my business and I’m going. Surely you don’t think I’m jealous of Dmitry, or that for the last three months I’ve been trying to steal his beautiful Katerina Ivanovna from him, do you? For heaven’s sake I’ve had other fish to fry. I’ve completed my business and I’m off. It’s all over now; you saw what happened.’

  ‘This morning at Katerina Ivanovna’s?’

  ‘Yes, I made a clean break. And so what? Why drag Dmitry into this? Dmitry’s got nothing to do with it. I had business of my own with Katerina Ivanovna. You know yourself that in fact Dmitry made it look as if he was in cahoots with me. I never asked him for anything; it was he himself who solemnly handed her to me on a plate. You have to laugh at it all. Listen, Alyosha, if only you knew what relief I feel now! I’ve been sitting here having lunch and, believe me, I wanted to order some champagne to celebrate my first hour of freedom. Phew, six months nearly—and suddenly at one go I’m shot of the whole thing. Little did I think yesterday that if you wanted to finish a relationship, it could all be over and done with just like that!’

  ‘Are you talking about your love, Ivan?’

  ‘Yes, if you like, you can call it love. I fell in love with a young girl, a schoolgirl. We made life hell for each other. I was obsessed with her… and suddenly it was all over. This morning when I was talking to her I was inspired, but when I left, I burst out laughing—believe me. I’m telling the truth.’

  ‘You’re still cheerful now,’ remarked Alyosha, glancing at his face, which had indeed suddenly lit up.

  ‘Well, how was I to know that I didn’t love her at all? Ha-ha, and it turns out that I didn’t. And yet I was so fond of her! You won’t believe how fond of her I was, even when I was holding forth this morning. Would you believe it, I still like her terribly, and yet how easy it is to break with her! Do you think I’m exaggerating?’

  ‘No. Only perhaps that wasn’t true love.’

  ‘Alyosha,’ laughed Ivan, ‘don’t start philosophizing about love! It doesn’t become you. Oh, how you let fly this morning! I should have hugged you for that… But she was tormenting me so! I was really sitting on a volcano. Oh, she knew that I loved her! It was me she loved, and not Dmitry,’ Ivan continued cheerfully. ‘Dmitry was just an excuse for emotional self-indulgence. Everything I said to her this morning was the absolute truth. Only, what you have to understand is that it will take her perhaps fifteen or twenty years to realize that she doesn’t love Dmitry at all, that she loves only me, whom she torments. Or maybe she’ll never realize it, in spite of today’s lesson. Well, it’s all for the best; I’ve made a stand and left her for good. Incidentally, how is she now? What happened after I left?’

  Alyosha told him of her hysterical outburst and that she was now delirious.

  ‘That Khokhlakova woman could be lying?’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  ‘We’ll have to find out. Anyway, nobody has ever died of hysterics. Hysterics, huh! God, in his love for them, gave women hysterics. I shan’t go to her place. What’s the use of getting involved again?’

  ‘All the same, you did say to her this morning that she’d never loved you.’

  ‘I said it deliberately. Alyosha, I’m going to order some champagne and we’ll drink to my freedom. Oh, if only you knew how happy I am!’

  ‘No, Ivan, we’d better not drink,’ said Alyosha suddenly. ‘And anyway, I’m sad in a way.’

  ‘Yes, you’ve been sad for a long time; I’ve noticed it for a while.’

  ‘So you’re definitely leaving tomorrow morning?’

  ‘In the morning? No, I didn’t say I was going in the morning… But perhaps I will after all. You know, I had lunch here today purely so as not to have to eat with the old man, he’s begun to disgust me so much. If it were only him, I’d have gone long ago. But why are you so worried about my leaving? Lord knows how much time we have before I leave. Ages and ages, a whole eternity!’

  ‘If you leave tomorrow, how can it be an eternity?’

  ‘Well, what’s that to us?’ laughed Ivan. ‘Surely we’ll find time to discuss what interests us, what we came here to talk about, won’t we? Why are you looking so surprised? Answer me. What did we come here for? To talk about my love for Katerina Ivanovna, about the old man and Dmitry? About foreign parts? About the disastrous situation in Russia? About the Emperor Napoleon? Is that what we came here for?’

  ‘No, not for that.’

  ‘That means you do understand what we came for. Others have their own problems to discuss, but for us young fledglings the main thing is to resolve the eternal questions, that’s our concern. All the youth of Russia now talks of nothing but the eternal questions. Especially now, when all the old ones are suddenly getting together to concern themselves with practical matters. Why have you been looking at me so expectantly for the past three months? To ask me, “Do you believe or don’t you believe at all?”* That’s what your glances of these three months have been leading up to, Aleksei Fyodorovich, haven’t they?’

  ‘Perhaps that’s it,’ smiled Alyosha. ‘You’re not laughing at me now, are you?’

  ‘Me, laughing? I wouldn’t want to d
istress my little brother, who’s been staring at me in such expectation for three months. Alyosha, take a good look at me. I’m just a little boy, exactly like you, except that I’m not a novice. After all, how have Russian boys always behaved? Some of them, anyway. Here, for example, in this stinking little inn, they come and sit in a corner. All their previous lives they haven’t got to know each other, they walk out of the inn and, forty years later, they still won’t know each other, so what are they going to discuss when they snatch a minute at the inn? The universal questions, what else! Does God exist? Is there such a thing as immortality? And those that don’t believe in God will start to talk about socialism and anarchism, about refashioning mankind according to some new system. Well, they’ll all end up in a hell of a mess, the same damned questions just looked at from opposite points of view. And on the whole, the most original of our young Russians in this day and age spend all their time talking about eternal questions. Isn’t that so?’

  ‘Yes; for true Russians, of course, the questions that arise first and foremost are whether God exists, whether there is such a thing as immortality, or, as you say, it’s a matter of looking at the issue from opposite points of view, and that’s only right and proper,’ said Alyosha, looking at his brother all the while with that same quiet, searching smile.

  ‘Sometimes, Alyosha, to be Russian is not to be at all clever, but all the same one can’t imagine anything more absurd than the questions that interest the Russian youth today. But there’s one Russian youth—you, Alyoshka—whom I love very dearly.’

  ‘How cleverly you led up to that,’ laughed Alyosha.

  ‘Well now, where shall we start? You tell me—with God? Does God exist or not?’

  ‘Start wherever you like, from “the opposite point of view”, if you prefer. After all, yesterday, at father’s, you said that there was no God.’ Alyosha glanced probingly at his brother.

  ‘Yesterday at dinner at the old man’s I said that deliberately to provoke you, and I could see your eyes flashing. But now I feel like discussing it with you, and I’m being perfectly serious. I want to get closer to you, Alyosha, because I have no friends, so I’d like to try. Now, try to imagine that I too, perhaps, accept God,’ laughed Ivan. ‘You didn’t expect that, did you, eh?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t; that is, provided you’re really being serious now.’

  ‘Serious? Yesterday at the starets’s they said I wasn’t serious. Look, my dear brother, in the eighteenth century there was one old sinner who claimed that if there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him: s’il n’existait pas Dieu il faudrait l’inventer* And man really has invented God. But that’s not what’s strange—what’s amazing is not that God actually exists; what’s amazing is that such an idea—the idea of the necessity of God—could enter the head of such a savage and evil creature as man, an idea so holy, so moving, so wise, and which does so much honour to man. As for me, I’ve long since given up wondering whether man created God, or God man. It goes without saying that I’m not going to start wading through all the latest axioms spouted by Russian youth on this subject, all of them without exception drawn from European hypotheses; because what constitutes a hypothesis in Europe immediately becomes an axiom to Russian youth—and not only to the young, but perhaps to their professors too, because Russian professors themselves are very often just like those same Russian youngsters. So, I shall avoid all hypotheses. Well then, what is the question that concerns us now, you and me? It is this: I have to explain to you as quickly as possible what is the essential me, that is, what sort of person I am, what I believe in and what I hope for, that’s it, isn’t it? And so I declare that I accept God purely and simply. Here, however, we have to accept the fact that if God exists and if He really did create the world, He created it, as we know full well, according to Euclidean geometry, and gave man a mind that can understand only three dimensions of space. However, there have been, and are even now, even amongst the most eminent mathematicians and philosophers, some who question whether the whole universe or, to take it even further, the whole of existence, was created purely according to Euclidean theory; they even venture to suggest that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid cannot meet on earth under any circumstances, will perhaps meet somewhere at infinity.* I decided, my dear fellow, that if I couldn’t even understand that, then how could I presume to understand God? I humbly admit that I don’t have the ability to decide such questions. I have a Euclidean mind, a terrestrial mind, and so I maintain that we cannot decide questions that are not of this world. And I advise you too, Alyosha, my friend, never to think about such things, especially about God and whether He exists or not. These questions are most definitely unsuited to a mind created with an understanding of only three dimensions. And so, I accept God, and not only do I wholeheartedly accept Him, but, what’s more, I accept his wisdom and his unfathomable plan, I believe in order, in the meaning of life, I believe in the eternal harmony into which, so it is said, we shall all melt, I believe in the Word* towards which the universe is moving, which is “in God” and which is God, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. A lot has been written and said on that subject. I seem to be on the right path, don’t I? Well then, consider this: in the final analysis I reject this God-created universe, and although I know it exists, I reject it out of hand. It is not God that I don’t accept—understand that—it’s His creation, His world that I reject and that I cannot agree to accept. Let me put it another way: even though I’m convinced, with a childlike faith, that suffering will be relieved and eliminated, that all the obscene comedy of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like a sordid invention of the Euclidean mind of man, feeble and puny, minuscule as an atom, and that at last on the day of reckoning, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will occur and come to pass that, in every heart, it will suffice to assuage every indignity, expiate every evil committed by men, all the blood spilt by men, that it will suffice not only for the forgiveness but also for the justification of everything that has happened on earth—let it, let it all be so and let it all come to pass, but I still do not accept it and have no wish to accept it! Let parallel lines meet and let me see it with my own eyes: I will see it and I will say that they have met, and yet at the same time I will not accept it. There, Alyosha, there you have my thesis, the essence of my being. This time I have spoken in all seriousness. I purposely began our conversation as absurdly as I could, but I have led up to my confession, because that’s all you need. You didn’t want to hear me talk about God; you only want to find out what makes your favourite brother tick. There, now you know.’

  Ivan concluded his long exposition suddenly and with unaccustomed and unexpected emotion.

  ‘But why did you begin “as absurdly as you could”?’ asked Alyosha, looking at him thoughtfully.

  ‘Well, in the first place, simply to keep it in the Russian tradition; in Russia all conversations about such matters are always conducted in the most absurd manner possible. And secondly, because the more absurd the approach, the closer one gets to the crux of the matter. Clarity in absurdity. Absurdity is direct and guileless, whereas the intellect is evasive and illusive. The intellect is a blackguard, but absurdity is undeviating and honourable. I have steered the argument towards what fills me with despair, and the more absurdly I’ve presented it, the closer I’ve got to the truth.’

  ‘Are you going to explain to me why you “do not accept the world”?’ asked Alyosha.

  ‘But of course; it’s no secret. That’s what I was leading up to. My little brother, I don’t want to corrupt you or undermine your faith; perhaps I want to redeem myself through you,’ Ivan smiled suddenly, just like a shy little boy. Alyosha had never seen him smile like that before.

  4

  REBELLION

  ‘THERE’S one thing I have to confess to you,’ began Ivan, ‘I could never understand how one could love one’s neighbour. In my opinion it’s precisely those who are near to us that it
is impossible to love, and one can love only those who are distant from us. I read something somewhere about a saint called “John the Merciful”;* how on one occasion when a traveller, hungry and frozen, came to him and asked for warmth, he lay down with him in his bed, embraced him, and began to breathe into his mouth, which was purulent and stinking from some dreadful disease. I’m sure that he did so with a certain degree of hypocrisy, in response to a dutiful love, as a self-imposed penance. One can love a man only when he’s out of sight; as soon as he shows his face, that’s the end of love.’

  ‘Starets Zosima said that more than once,’ said Alyosha. ‘He also said that in the case of many who were inexperienced in the art of loving, a man’s face was often a hindrance to love. And yet, you know, there’s a lot of love in mankind, even Christlike love; I know this personally, Ivan…’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that, and frankly it’s beyond me, like it is too for countless other people. The question is: does this result from man’s evil qualities, or is it simply in his nature? In my opinion the love of Christ for man is a kind of miracle that’s impossible on earth. True, He was God. But we are not gods. Let us suppose that I, for example, suffer deeply; now, another person cannot know how deeply I suffer, because he is another person and not me, and then on top of that it is rare for one person to recognize the suffering of another—as if it were a question of rank. Why won’t he agree to recognize it; what do you think? Because, perhaps, I smell, I have a stupid face, or because I once trod on his foot. What’s more, there is suffering and suffering: my benefactor will accept that I may suffer from a degrading kind of suffering that humiliates me—hunger, for example—but that I may suffer from a rather nobler kind of suffering—suffer for an idea, for example—no, he’ll rarely accept that, because he, for instance, will look at me and suddenly realize that, according to his preconceptions, my face is not the face of someone who suffers for an idea. So he immediately deprives me of his charity, but not at all from ill will. Beggars, especially well-born beggars, should never disclose their identity openly, but rather should appeal for charity in the newspapers. One can love one’s neighbour in the abstract and sometimes even at a distance, but close up almost never. If only it were as it is on the stage, in the ballet, where beggars appear dressed in silk rags and torn lace and dance gracefully as they beg for alms, then one might be able to admire them. Admire, but still not love. But enough of that. I just had to give you my point of view. I wanted to start by talking about the suffering of mankind in general, but instead we’d better stick to the suffering of children. That will reduce the scale of my argument tenfold, so it will be better to stick to children. It’s less favourable to my argument, of course. Well, first, one can love children even close up, even dirty or ugly children—although it seems to me that children can never be ugly. Secondly, if I don’t speak of adults, it’s also because, besides being repugnant and undeserving of love, they have retribution to make: they have eaten of the apple and know good and evil, and they have become “as gods”.* And still they continue to eat of it. But children have eaten nothing and are still completely innocent. Do you love children, Alyosha? I know you do, and you’ll understand why I just want to talk only about children now. If they also suffer terribly on this earth, then naturally they suffer for their fathers; they are punished for their fathers, who have eaten of the apple—but you know, that way of reasoning belongs to another world and is quite incomprehensible to the human mind on earth. The innocent—above all such innocents as these—should not have to suffer for others! You’ll be surprised to hear, Alyosha, that I too love children very much. And note well that cruel, passionate people, with unbridled desires, like the Karamazovs, often have a great love of children. Children, while they’re still children, say up to the age of seven, differ greatly from adults, as if they were a totally different species with a totally different nature. I knew a robber who was sent to prison; in the course of his life of crime he had massacred whole families in their homes while robbing them, and what’s more he had cut the throats of several children on those occasions. But while he was in prison he showed an uncommon love for them. He would spend all his time looking out of the window of his cell, watching the children playing in the prison yard. He trained one little boy to come to his window, and they became great friends… You don’t know, Alyosha, why I’m telling you all this, do you? I have a headache, and I feel sad.’