then there are the children, and what am I to do about them? That’s a question I can’t answer. For the hundredth time I repeat, there are numbers of questions, but I’ve only taken the children, because in their case what I mean is so unanswerably clear. Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it – tell me please? It’s beyond all comprehension why they should suffer and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they too furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers’ crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn’t grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years of age.
“Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be, when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: ‘Thou art just, O Lord, for thy ways are revealed.’ 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!’ then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can’t accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I too may perhaps cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child’s torturer, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ But I don’t want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse with its unexpiated tears to ‘dear, kind God’! It’s not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care for avenging them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured? And what becomes of harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don’t want more suffering.
“And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. I don’t want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself if she will, let her forgive the torturer for the immeasurable suffering of her mother’s heart. But the sufferings of her tortured child she has no right to forgive; she dare not forgive the torturer, even if the child were to forgive him! And if that is so, if they dare not forgive, what becomes of harmony? Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I don’t want harmony. From love for humanity I don’t want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay so much to enter. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man, I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.”
“That’s rebellion,” murmured Alyosha, looking down.
“Rebellion? I am sorry you call it that,” said Ivan earnestly. “One can hardly live in rebellion, and I want to live. Tell me yourself, I challenge you – answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature – that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance – and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.”
“No, I wouldn’t consent,” said Alyosha softly.
“And can you admit the idea that men for whom you are building it would agree to accept their happiness on the foundation of the unexpiated blood of a little victim? And accepting it would remain happy for ever?”
“No, I can’t admit it. Brother,” said Alyosha suddenly, with flashing eyes, “you said just now, is there a being in the whole world who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? But there is a being and he can forgive everything, all and for all, because he gave his innocent blood for all and everything. You have forgotten him, and on him is built the edifice, and it is to him they cry aloud, ‘Thou art just, O Lord, for thy ways are revealed!’”
“Ah! the one without sin and his blood! No, I have not forgotten him; on the contrary I’ve been wondering all the time how it was you did not bring him in before, for usually all arguments on your side put him in the foreground. Do you know, Alyosha – don’t laugh! I made a poem about a year ago. If you can waste another ten minutes on me, I’ll tell it to you.”
“You wrote a poem?”
“Oh, no. I didn’t write it,” laughed Ivan, “and I’ve never written two lines of poetry in my life. But I made up this poem in prose and I remembered it. I was carried away when I made it up. You will be my first reader – that is, listener. Why should an author forego even one listener?” smiled Ivan. “Shall I tell it to you?”
“I am all attention,” said Alyosha.
“My poem is called ‘The Grand Inquisitor’; it’s a ridiculous thing, but I want to tell it to you.”
The Devil
This is a delirious dream of Ivan Karamazov. It is probably unique in world literature as an attempt to portray how the uncontrolled ego of a conscious atheist expresses itself, an atheist who knows a great deal more about God than most believers. The dream has only an inner connection with the novel as a whole. Ivan is physically ill as well. His illness (“brain fever”) was caused by outer circumstances, but its hallucinations come from the deepest emotional content of his subconscious.
Ivan had just had a bad shake-up after the onset of his illness. Smerdyakov, the servant and illegitimate son of Ivan’s murdered father, had confessed to him that it was he who had murdered the older Karamazov, not Ivan’s half-brother Dmitri, who was in prison for the crime. To prove the truth of his confession, Smerdyakov handed Ivan the 3000 rubles for the sake of which he had committed the murder. He went on to say that it was Ivan himself who had incited him to commit the crime – not only through his godless talking, his continual denial of God’s existence. Smerdyakov had been firmly convinced after an exchange with Ivan before the murder that in committing it he would be acting according to Ivan’s wishes. Ivan cannot possibly doubt the sincerity of these confessions. Accordingly, he suddenly sees himself as his father’s murderer. To escape despair, he now needs God, whom he was unwilling to recognize before.
I AM NOT A DOCTOR, but yet I feel that the moment has come when I must of necessity give the reader some account of the nature of Ivan’s illness. Looking ahead, I can say at least one thing: he was at that moment on the very eve of an attack of brain fever. Though long affected by it, his health had offered a born resistance to the fever that in the end gained complete mastery. Though I know nothing of medicine, I venture to suggest that perhaps he really had, by a terrible effort of will, succeeded in delaying the attack for a time, hoping of course to check it completely. He knew that he was unwell, but he loathed the thought of being ill at that fateful time, at the approaching crisis in his life, when he needed to have all his wits about him, to say what he had to say boldly and resolutely, and “to justify himself to himself.”
He
