The Karamazov Brothers

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  ‘Idiot,’ Ivan repeated once more.

  ‘There you go again, but last year I had such an almighty bout of rheumatism that I still can’t forget it.’

  ‘The devil suffering from rheumatism? That’s a good one!’

  ‘Why ever not, seeing as I take on human form sometimes? If I adopt the form, I accept the consequences. Satanas sum et nihil humani a me alienum puto.’*

  ‘Satanas sum et nihil humani … not bad for the devil!’

  ‘I’m glad I’ve managed to please you at last.’

  ‘My word, you didn’t get that from me!’ Ivan stopped suddenly, as if thunderstruck. ‘That never entered my head. How odd…’

  ‘C’est du nouveau, n’est-ce pas?* This time I’ll come clean and explain. Listen: sometimes when a man is asleep, especially when he has a nightmare (due to indigestion or the like), he has such vivid, realistic, and complex dreams, he sees such events—or rather a whole sequence of events linked by a plot which includes such bizarre details, ranging from the highest flights of the human spirit down to the last button on a shirt-front—that I swear Leo Tolstoy* himself couldn’t invent them. And, incidentally, it’s not always writers who have such dreams, but perfectly ordinary people too, scribblers, journalists, priests… and there you have the nub of the problem: a certain minister even admitted to me that all his best ideas came to him while he was asleep. Well, that’s how it is now. Although I’m a hallucination, nevertheless, as in a nightmare, I say things which are original, things that have never occurred to you before, which means I’m not merely repeating your thoughts and yet at the same time I’m simply your nightmare and nothing else.’

  ‘You’re lying. Your aim is precisely to convince me that you exist independently as yourself and not as my nightmare, and now you yourself are insisting that you’re a dream.’

  ‘My friend, today I have selected a particular method, which I shall explain to you later. Now, where was I? Oh yes, I caught a cold, not here at your place, but over there…’

  ‘Where over there? Tell me, are you intending to stay long, why don’t you just go away?’ exclaimed Ivan, almost in despair. He ceased pacing about, sat down on the divan, and once more put his elbows on the table and clasped his head in his hands. He pulled off the wet towel and threw it aside angrily; it had obviously been of no help.

  ‘Your nerves are on edge,’ said the gentleman casually, but quite amiably. ‘You even resent my being able to catch a cold, but in fact it happened in the most natural way. I was hurrying to a diplomatic soirée at the house of a certain aristocratic lady in St Petersburg who was determined to obtain a ministerial post for her husband. So there I was, in tails, white tie and gloves, but I was God knows where, and I had to travel through all of outer space before I could reach earth… of course, it only takes a moment, but even the sun’s rays take all of eight minutes, and so you can imagine me, in tails, waistcoat open at the front. Spirits don’t die of cold, but when you’ve taken on human form, then… well, in a word, I was rather foolish and set off, and you know, up there, in outer space, in the ether, “in the midst of those waters above the firmament”,* what a frost!… what am I saying, “frost”? You can’t really call it frost, imagine: a hundred and fifty degrees below! The village girls have a little trick: when it’s thirty degrees below, they invite a greenhorn to lick an axe, his tongue immediately freezes to the metal, and when the fool tears it away his tongue is raw and bleeding. And that’s at thirty below, but at a hundred and fifty below, I should think you’d only have to touch the axe with your finger and there’d be no finger left—that is, if there could be such a thing as an axe out there…’

  ‘And could an axe exist there?’ Ivan interjected distractedly, with an air of distaste. With all his might he was trying not to believe in this manifestation of his delirium and to resist descent into total madness.

  ‘Axe?’ queried the visitor in surprise.

  ‘Yes, what would become of an axe out there?’ shouted Ivan Fyodorovich with a kind of wild and insistent obstinacy.

  ‘What would become of an axe in space? Quelle idée!* If it were to go too far out, I think it would go into orbit round the earth, without knowing why itself—like a sort of satellite. Astronomers would calculate the rise and setting of the axe, Gatsouk* would enter it in his calendar, that’s all.’

  ‘You’re stupid, utterly stupid!’ said Ivan contrarily. ‘If you’re going to tell lies show a bit more intelligence, or I’m not going to listen. You want to defeat me with realism, convince me that you exist, but I don’t want to believe that you exist! I won’t believe it!’

  ‘I’m not lying, it’s all true; unfortunately, truth is nearly always dull. I can see you’re determined to believe I’m something grand, nay grandiose. It’s a great pity, because I give only what I can…’

  ‘Don’t start philosophizing, you ass!’

  ‘Fat lot of philosophizing I can do when I’m paralysed all down my right side and wheezing and groaning. I’ve been to see all the doctors; they’re brilliant at diagnosis, they’ll diagnose your illness symptom by symptom, but they can’t cure you. There was one student fellow, terribly enthusiastic: “If you die,” he said to me, “at least you’ll know what you died of!” And they have a passion for referring you to specialists: “We”, they say, “can only give a diagnosis, but go to such-and-such a specialist, and he’ll cure you.” I tell you, the old-style doctor who used to cure one of all manner of diseases has completely, totally disappeared, and now we only have specialists who advertise in the papers. If your nose hurts they’ll send you to Paris, where, they tell you, there is a European nose specialist. You go to Paris and he examines your nose. “I can only treat your right nostril,” he says, “I don’t do left nostrils, it’s not my field, but when I’ve finished with you go to Vienna; there’s a specialist in left nostrils there who’ll finish off the job for you.” What can one do? I resorted to folk remedies, and one German doctor advised me to rub myself with honey and salt in the sauna. Any excuse to go to the public baths, so I went, smothered myself with the stuff, but all to no avail. In despair I wrote to Count Mattei* of Milan; he sent me his book and some drops, but I might as well not have bothered. And guess what, it was Hoff’s malt extract that cured me! I bought some by chance, drank a bottle and a half, and I was dancing on air, a miracle cure. I was determined to put a thank-you notice in the papers, I was so grateful, and thereby hangs another tale; not a single paper would accept my notice! “It’s not on,” they said, “no one would believe it, le diable n ‘existe point.* Publish it anonymously.” Well, what sort of a thank-you would it be if it was anonymous? I joked with the clerks, “It’s unfashionable to believe in God these days,” I said, “but I’m the devil, it’s quite acceptable to believe in me.” “We understand,” they said, “who doesn’t believe in the devil, but it’s impossible all the same, it would lower the tone of the paper. Unless you were to make a joke of it?” Well, I didn’t think it would be a very witty joke. So they didn’t print it. And believe me, that really cut me to the quick. Because of my social position, they refuse to believe I can have fine feelings such as gratitude.’

  ‘You’re back to philosophy,’ Ivan growled.

  ‘Heaven forbid! But one can’t help complaining sometimes. I’m a much maligned person. You keep telling me I’m stupid. There speaks youth. My friend, it’s not only a matter of intelligence! I’m blessed with a kind and cheerful disposition; “I’ve turned my hand to vaudeville and that sort of thing”.* You seem to be determined to cast me as a grey-haired Khlestakov,* but I’m destined for far greater things. I was singled out by some sort of prehistoric decree, which I’ve never been able to understand, as epitomizing “negation”, but in fact I am genuinely kind and just not suited for negation. But no, I have to go forth and negate; without negation there would be no satire, and what’s the good of a magazine without a critics’ section? Without criticism there’d be nothing but Hosannas. But man cannot live by Hosannas alo
ne, those Hosannas have to be tempered in the crucible of doubt—and all that sort of stuff. Anyway, I don’t get involved with all that, it wasn’t my idea to create the world, and I’m not responsible for it. But they made me the scapegoat and forced me to contribute to the critics’ section, and life took off. We all know it’s a comedy; I, for one, make no bones about it, and I’ve asked to be annihilated. “No,” comes the answer, “you have to exist because without you there’d be nothing. If everything on earth were run according to reason, nothing would ever happen. Without you life would be uneventful and that would never do, things have to happen.” And so, against my better nature, I do my best to make things happen, I create disorder to order, as it were. In spite of their undoubted intelligence, people take all this charade seriously. And therein lies their tragedy. Well, they suffer of course, but… all the same, they live, they live real lives, not a fantasy: for suffering is the very stuff of life. Without suffering, what pleasure would there be in life? Everything would turn into an endless Te Deum— holy, but rather boring. And what about me? I suffer, but I don’t live. I am the x in an indeterminate equation. I’m a sort of ghostly reflection of life that’s completely lost its bearings and has finished by even forgetting what to call itself. You’re laughing… no, you’re not laughing, you’re getting angry again. You’re always getting angry, you always want everything to be so logical. But I repeat what I told you before, that I’d gladly give up all this superstellar life, all my ranks and honours, just to become in flesh and spirit some eighteen-stone merchant’s wife and light candles in church.’

  ‘So you don’t believe in God either?’ Ivan laughed spitefully.

  ‘How shall I put it? If you’re serious, that is…’

  ‘Is there a God or not?’ Ivan shouted with aggressive impetuosity.

  ‘Ah, so you are serious? My dear fellow, honest to God, I don’t know. Now doesn’t that make you think?’

  ‘You don’t know, but you see God? No, you don’t exist as yourself, you are me, you are me and nothing else! You are a nobody, a figment of my imagination!’

  ‘You could say we have the same philosophy, that would be justice. fe pense done je suis,* that much I am sure of; as for the rest, what’s around me, all those worlds, God, and even Satan himself—all that is unproven for me, whether it exists of itself or whether it is only an emanation of myself, a logical development of my self, which has its own personal and timeless existence… that is to say, I cut short my discourse because I have the impression that you are about to leap up and strike me.’

  ‘I’d rather you told me a funny story!’ said Ivan despondently.

  ‘I do just happen to have a good story apropos of what we were discussing, that is, it’s not exactly a story, rather a myth. You reproach me for my lack of faith; you say: “you see, but you don’t believe.” But, my friend, I am not alone in that, you know, all of us up there are troubled, and all on account of your science. While it was just atoms, the five senses and the four elements, everything was sensible and coherent. There were atoms even in the ancient world. And then we heard that you had discovered the “chemical molecule” and “protoplasm” and devil knows what else—that really put the cat among the pigeons up there. All hell broke loose; what with all the superstition and gossip-mongering (we have as much gossip-mongering as you, and more besides), and then finally there were the denunciations, for don’t forget, we too have our department of “classified information”. So there you are, it’s a wild sort of myth from our middle ages—ours not yours—and no one believes it, even amongst us, except some eighteen-stone wife of a merchant, that is—again, ours not yours. Everything you have down here, we have up there too, that’s one of our secrets I’m revealing to you as a friend, although it’s strictly forbidden. Now here’s a legend about paradise. Once upon a time, so the story goes, there lived here on this earth a certain thinker and philosopher who repudiated everything—laws, conscience, faith, and, most importantly, the afterlife. He died expecting to experience only darkness and death, but instead there stretched before him—the afterlife. He was astonished and indignant: “This”, he said, “is contrary to my convictions.” For that, he was promptly condemned… that is, you see, forgive me, I’m only telling you what I’ve heard, it’s only a legend… he was condemned, you see, to travel the dark void for a quadrillion kilometres (we’ve gone metric, you know), and when he’d travelled his quadrillion, they opened the gates of paradise and forgave him everything…’

  ‘And what other torments do you have in your world, apart from that quadrillion?’ asked Ivan with a strange kind of excitement.

  ‘What torments? Oh, don’t ask; we used to have all sorts, but now we’ve gone over to moral torments, “pangs of conscience” and all that rubbish. We owe that to you too, to your “relaxation of moral standards”. And who has benefited? Only the unscrupulous, because what are pangs of conscience to those who have no conscience? On the other hand decent, respectable people who still have consciences and honour have suffered… That’s what comes of trying to implement reforms without preparing the ground first, and, moreover, when those reforms are copied from foreign institutions—it does nothing but harm! Give me old-fashioned fire any day. Well, so this philosopher who’d been condemned to travel a quadrillion kilometres stood and looked around for a moment or two, and then lay down in the road: “I don’t wish to go any further; I refuse on principle!” Take the soul of an enlightened Russian atheist and mix it with the soul of the prophet Jonah, who sulked for three days and three nights in the belly of a whale, and there you have that thinker lying on the road.’

  ‘What did he lie on?’

  ‘Well, he must have had something to lie on. You’re being perfectly serious, are you?’

  ‘Smart fellow!’ cried Ivan, still strangely excited. Now he was listening with a curiosity he hadn’t expected. ‘Well, go on, is he still lying there?’

  ‘Actually, no. He lay there for nearly a thousand years, then he got up and walked away.’

  ‘Stupid ass!’ Ivan exclaimed with a nervous laugh, desperately trying to gather his thoughts. ‘It would come to much the same thing, wouldn’t it—to lie there for eternity or to walk a quadrillion versts? After all, that’s a billion years’ walking, isn’t it?’

  ‘Much more; I haven’t got a pencil and paper handy, or I could work it out. Anyway he got there a long time ago, and that’s where the story begins.’

  ‘What do you mean, “he got there”? What about the billion years?’

  ‘The trouble is you keep thinking in terms of our present-day earth! But the earth itself may have been recycled a billion times over, perished, withstood the ice age, fissured, crumbled to dust, been reduced to its elements, to “the waters which were above the firmament”, then back to a comet, from the comet the sun again, from the sun back to the earth again—that cycle has been repeated endlessly perhaps, and always exactly the same, down to the last detail. It’s a dreadful bore…’

  ‘Well, go on, what happened when he got there?’

  ‘As soon as they opened the gates of paradise for him he entered, and scarcely had two seconds passed—according to his watch, you know (although his watch, I should think, must have disintegrated into its basic elements in his pocket long ago)—scarcely had two seconds passed when he cried out that in those two seconds one could walk not a quadrillion but a quadrillion quadrillions to the power of quadrillion! In short he sang a Hosanna, in fact he went so far over the top that some of the more noble-minded thinkers even refused to shake his hand at first; he had espoused conservatism rather too readily. That’s your Russian character. As I say, it’s just a legend. I offer it to you for what it’s worth. There you have the kind of ideas that are current up there.’

  ‘I’ve caught you out!’ shouted Ivan with almost childlike glee, as if he had suddenly remembered everything. ‘I made that quadrillion story up myself! I was seventeen, and at high school in Moscow… I made it up and told it to one of my
friends, his name was Korovkin… That story is so unusual that there’s nowhere I could have picked it up from. I’d forgotten about it… but I’d remembered it unconsciously… I myself, it wasn’t you who reminded me! Like one remembers a thousand things, sometimes unconsciously, even on the way to the scaffold… I remembered it in a dream. You are that dream! You’re a dream and you don’t exist!’

  ‘Judging by the vehemence with which you reject me,’ laughed the gentleman, ‘I’m sure, nevertheless, that you believe in me.’

  ‘Not at all! Not a hundredth part!’

  ‘But a thousandth part. Perhaps homoeopathic doses are the strongest. Come on, admit that you believe, well, a ten-thousandth part.’

  ‘Not for one minute!’ cried Ivan furiously. ‘Still, I would like to believe in you,’ he added strangely.

  ‘Aha! There’s an admission! But I’m a kind chap, I’ll give you a bit of help. Listen, it was I who caught you out, not the other way round! I deliberately told you your own story, which you had forgotten, so that you would finally stop believing in me.’

  ‘You’re lying! The reason for your appearance here is to convince me that you exist.’

  ‘Precisely. But uncertainty, worry, the conflict between belief and disbelief—all that is sometimes such torture to a conscientious man like yourself that it could be enough to make you hang yourself. Knowing that you did believe in me a bit, I instilled a good dose of doubt in you with that story. I’m feeding you belief and disbelief alternately, and I have my own reasons for that. It’s the latest method; when you really have ceased to believe in me, it’ll be you who will try to convince me that I am not a dream, that I actually exist; I know you. Then I shall have achieved my aim. And my aim is a noble one. I shall throw you only a tiny seed of faith, and from it will grow an oak tree—such an oak that you, sitting in that tree, will want to go and join the “anchorite fathers and the women without sin”,* for that is what you want secretly in your heart of hearts, to eat locusts and drag yourself off to seek salvation in the desert!’