Dostoevsky (193 page)

Combining “the soul of an enlightened Russian atheist . . . with the soul of the prophet Jonah, who sulked for three days and nights in the belly of the whale,” he lay there for a thousand years, but he finally picked himself up and went on. Ivan then interjects that the philospher behaved stupidly by agreeing to move at all because, by Euclidean reckoning, it would take him a billion years to reach his goal. But in fact, as the devil explains, “he got there long ago,” because all such mathematical reckonings refer to the present earth, and “our present earth may have been repeated a billion times . . . [disintegrating] into its elements, again ‘the water above the firmament’ [a quotation from Genesis in Church Slavonic], then again a comet,” and so on. Dostoevsky here appeals to the same idea of eternal recurrence, a commonplace in classical antiquity, that Nietzsche would employ for his own purposes, and like his German counterpart, Ivan also finds this cyclical prospect “insufferably tedious.” The lexical admixture of the scientific terminology of the period with biblical references is typical of the devil’s narrative style and conveys the quandary in which Ivan is trapped.

Reaching his goal at last, the philosopher had not been there for two seconds (though the devil doubts that he still had a watch) when “he cried out that those two seconds were worth walking not a quadrillion kilometers but a quadrillion of quadrillions, raised to the quadrillionth power.” In fact, he was so carried away that “he sang ‘hosannah’ and overdid it so that some persons there of lofty ideas wouldn’t shake hands with him at first—he’d become too rapidly reactionary, they said” (15: 78–79). Is this not Dostoevsky sarcastically referring to the criticisms he so often encountered of being a turncoat? And although Ivan then recalls having written this anecdote to ridicule religion when he was still a schoolboy, it also reveals, underneath the jesting, his subliminal longing for faith, a longing equally expressed in the devil’s desire to leave the realm of non-Euclidean “indeterminate equations” and become incarnate “once for all and irrevocably in the form of some merchant’s wife, weighing two hundred fifty pounds and . . . believing all she believes” (15: 73–74). This yearning is disclosed directly by Ivan when, after asserting that “not for a minute” did he believe in the reality of the devil, he adds “strangely”: “But I should like to believe in you” (15: 19).

The full implication of Ivan’s ideas becomes clear when the devil reminds him of one of his earlier compositions—not the “Grand Inquisitor,” whose mention causes Ivan to become “crimson with shame”—but a work called “The Geological Cataclysm.” This title refers to a future when men will have lost all notion of God, and human life will be as much transformed as if the earth had undergone a geological mutation. Dostoevsky here employs his familiar symbolism of the Golden Age; this would again be a Feuerbachian universe, where “love will be sufficient only for a moment of life, but the very consciousness of its momentariness will intensify its fire, which now is dissipated in dreams of an eternal love beyond the grave.” This would be a world in which “man will be lifted up with a spirit of divine titanic pride and the Man-god would appear.” And by “extending his conquest of nature infinitely by his will and his science, man will feel such lofty joy . . . that it will make up for all his old dreams of the joys of heaven” (15: 83).

Such had been Ivan’s vision, which draws on imagery recalling Kirillov in
Demons
as well as that of the Golden Age. But because of “man’s inherent stupidity,” of which Ivan is only too well aware, the devil understands that it may take a thousand years or more before such a world can come into being; and perhaps it may never be born at all. Ivan and those who share his ideas will therefore become impatient, like those “elect” who finally joined the Grand Inquisitor, and decide that “everyone who recognizes the truth even now may legitimately order his life as he pleases, on the new principles. In that sense ‘all things are lawful for him’ . . . and since there is no God and no immortality anyway, the new man may well become the Man-god . . . who may lightheartedly overstep all the barriers of the old morality of the old slave-man, if necessary.”
(The proto-Nietzschean term “slave-man,”
rab-chelovek
, is quite literal.) As the devil cynically comments, all this theorizing “is very charming, but if you want to swindle why do you want a moral sanction for doing it?” (15: 83–84). Idealistic dreams of a transformed humanity can lead not only to swindling but also, as Ivan has now become aware, to a justification for murder. It is impossible here not to think again of Dostoevsky’s actual social-political position, in which those whom he was willing to accept as misguided “idealists” were bent on murdering the Tsar-Father.

All through this chapter, the violence of Ivan’s reaction to the devil’s words is turned back against himself. For if the devil is nothing but his hallucination, why respond so furiously? When Ivan threatens to kick the devil, the latter responds, “I won’t be altogether sorry, for then my object will be attained. If you kick me, you must believe in my reality, for people don’t kick ghosts” (15: 73). At the climax of the scene, as the devil runs on about “The Geological Cataclysm,” Ivan “suddenly snatched a glass from the table and flung it at the orator,” who leaps up, brushes off the drops of tea, and comments, “He remembers Luther’s inkstand [which Luther had flung at the devil]! He takes me for a dream and throws glasses at a dream!” (15: 84). The devil has thus succeeded in convincing Ivan that he is “real,” though the latter continues to insist that the visitation is still only part of himself. But Ivan can no longer refuse to understand what he has been telling himself through the devil—that reason cannot eradicate the torments of his moral conscience.

At this point, the outside world begins to intrude on the sleeping Ivan, and waking, he finds that the physical events he had dreamed of had never taken place. No wet towel lay on his feverish brow, no glass of tea had moved from its place on the table, nor was there any nagging visitor sitting on the sofa facing him. Ivan’s first reaction is then to affirm the “reality” of what he had earlier insisted had been only an apparition. “It was not a dream!” he cried out to himself, thus trying to preserve the safeguard of his sanity. When he opens the window, Alyosha (who has been tapping on the window), informs him that “an hour ago Smerdyakov had hanged himself” (15: 85).

Ivan insists “I knew Smerdyakov hanged himself,” affirming that “
he
[the devil] had told me so just now.” This is not literally true, but the devil had indeed warned Ivan that the conflict between belief and disbelief was such torture that “it could be enough to make you hang yourself” (15: 80). And in Ivan’s disordered frame of mind, such words applied to himself could well have been shifted to Smerdyakov, similarly tormented by the same uncertainties. Alyosha’s arrival causes the devil to vanish from Ivan’s psyche, if not as a recollection then as a presence, but Ivan’s inner debate with himself continues. Completely bewildered, he insists that the devil had been in his rooms, but then acknowledges that “
he
is myself . . . All that’s base in me.” Still, Ivan admits that “he told me a
good deal that was true about myself. . . . I would never have owned it to myself.” Most of all, the devil understood the source of Ivan’s mortification: “You are going to perform an act of heroic virtue,” he had told Ivan, “and you don’t believe in virtue; that’s what tortures you and makes you angry, that’s why you are so vindictive.” Now that Smerdyakov is dead, any hope of saving Dimitry has vanished, and yet, the devil sneers, Ivan will go anyway. “And it would be all right if you believed in virtue. . . . But you are a little pig like Feodor Pavlovich and what do you want with virtue?” (15: 87–88).

The devil had had no doubt about how Ivan would act: “you’ll go because you won’t dare not to go,” though why this should be so “is a riddle for you” (15: 88). But it is not a riddle for Alyosha, who finally puts Ivan to bed when he collapses. Alyosha “began to understand Ivan’s illness. The anguish of a proud determination. A deep conscience! God, in Whom he disbelieved, and His Truth were gaining mastery in his heart.” Alyosha naturally imagines that “God will conquer,” and we shall soon see that Ivan will indeed obey the voice of his conscience. But Alyosha’s fears also leave open the possibility, not resolved by the time the novel ends, that Ivan will “perish in hate, revenging himself on himself and on everyone for having served the cause he does not believe in” (15: 89).

Indeed, during the trial of Dimitry for the murder of their father, all of Ivan’s contempt for humanity—the contempt underlying the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, despite its humanitarian pathos—comes to the fore as he turns on the judges and all the spectators in the courtroom, none of whom is shown as especially concerned with moral questions. When the startled president asks if Ivan is in his right mind, he replies, “I should think I am in my right mind . . . in the same nasty mind as you . . . and all those . . . ugly faces.” Humankind now becomes identified with himself: “They all desire the death of their fathers. One reptile devours another.” Alyosha cries out that Ivan has “brain fever,” but Ivan continues, “I am not mad, I am only a murderer.” When asked for proof of his accusation against Smerdyakov, he replies that he has no witnesses—except possibly the devil—and then rambles on, as if confiding a secret, in a stream-of-consciousness monologue composed of fragments taken from earlier scenes. “I told him I don’t want to keep quiet and he talked about the geological cataclysm . . . idiocy! Come . . . release the monster [Dimitry] . . . he’s been singing a hymn. . . . That’s because his heart is light. . . . It’s like a drunken man in the street howling how ‘Vanka went to Petersburg,’ and I would give a quadrillion quadrillions for two seconds of joy” (15: 117–118). The poignancy of these last words requires no comment.

The final section of the novel contains the extensive speeches of both the prosecuting attorney and the defense, and Dostoevsky uses them not only to provide
the proper climax to the plot-action involving Dimitry and Ivan but also as a means of internal commentary on the novel itself. The two lawyers argue about a case of murder, but their orations also illuminate the larger moral-spiritual (and hence implicitly social and political) problems that the novel has presented with such majestic amplitude.

According to the prosecuting attorney Ippolit Kirillovich, Russians are no longer horrified by the crime of murder, and his indictment would certainly have been read, in the context of the time, as a condemnation of those who, if not in sympathy with terrorism, then at least remained neutrally indifferent to its ravages. He argues that the Karamazov family presents a picture of contemporary educated Russia, and Feodor Pavlovich certainly represents—in the extreme, symbolically expressive form that only Dostoevsky knew how to create—the older generation of Russians among whom stable moral-social standards had entirely disappeared. Moreover, Ivan’s loss of faith and his theory, as Ippolit Kirillovich puts it, that “everything in the world is lawful,” that “nothing must be forbidden in future,” has driven Smerdyakov “out of his mind” (15: 126–127); and Dostoevsky here raises the possibility that the intelligentsia’s atheism will undermine the still devout Russian people.

Dimitry is seen as a symbol of Russia itself. He, argues the prosecutor, “represents Russia directly. . . . Yes, here she is, our Mother Russia, the very scent and smell of her. Oh, we are spontaneous, we are a marvelous mingling of good and bad, we are lovers of culture and Schiller, yet we brawl in taverns and pluck the beards of our boon companions” (15: 128). Both are part of the Karamazov character, which is “capable of containing the most incongruous contradictions and simultaneously contemplating both abysses, . . . the hightest ideals, and . . . the lowest and foulest degradations” (15: 129). These words echo Dimitry’s about the ceaseless conflict between the ideal of Sodom and that of the Madonna, but the entire book has shown his struggle to wrench himself free from the temptations of Sodom and commit himself to the Mother of God.

In conclusion, the prosecutor returns to the image of the Russian troika made famous in Gogol’s
Dead Souls
, where Russia is compared with a troika, furiously galloping to some distant destination and before which all the other nations give way. The jurors represent, he tells them, all “of our holy Russia, . . . her principles, her family, everything that she holds sacred!” The whole country awaits their verdict, as “our fatal troika dashes on in headlong flight, perhaps to destruction, and for a long time past men have stretched out imploring hands and called a halt to its furious, reckless course.” Other nations stand aside, “not from respect . . . but simply from horror,” and he warns that some day they may “form a firm wall confronting the hurrying apparition . . . for the sake of their own safety, enlightenment, and civilization.” The jury, Ippolit Kirillovich warns,
must not increase “their growing hatred by a sentence justifying the murder of a father by his son” (15: 150).

The famous defense attorney Fetyukovich, the star of the Petersburg bar, now offers a masterly defense of Dimitry in terms that the reader recognizes as accurate. His defense not only discredits the psychological inferences drawn by Ippolit Kirillovich, he also understands that Dimitry could act under the influence of love, honor, and pity, as well as out of the rage and jealousy considered his sole motivations by the prosecutor. Dostoevsky’s main criticism of the legal profession in his journalism, however, had been that defense lawyers, carried away by their task, often lost sight of the larger moral implications of their arguments, and this is exactly what occurs here. Fetyukovich goes too far, swept beyond the bounds of the morally legitimate by the desire to defend his client (who in this case at least was innocent).