Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  No scene testifies so abundantly to the brilliance and bite of Dostoevsky’s satirical talent as the chapter devoted to Ivan’s dialogue with the devil. It is customary to allude to the inspiration of Goethe’s Faust, and several references to it are contained in this scene as well as elsewhere in the text; but the relation between Ivan (who has been called “the Russian Faust”) and his devil is quite different from that of Faust and Mephistopheles. There is no question in Goethe about the reality of Mephistopheles’s existence or of the supernatural world from which he sprang. This is precisely the issue, however, that is posed to Ivan by the obsequiously ingratiating patter of his amiable visitor. Nowhere is Dostoevsky’s theme—the antagonism between reason and faith—dramatized with more subtlety and finesse than in these mocking pages, which illustrate Dostoevsky’s extraordinary ability to play with his own most deeply held convictions.

  The portrait of the devil, as Victor Terras has remarked, contains more descriptive detail than that of any other character.2 Dostoevsky takes great pains to present him in entirely earthly terms as a Russian social type. Because Ivan keeps insisting that the devil is just a figment of his imagination, Dostoevsky ironically gives him a solid embodiment. He shows up as a rather down-at-heels member of the landed gentry, a gentleman no longer able to support himself because the income from his estate has vanished since the abolition of serfdom, but he still exhibits all the social graces of his former position, such as embroidering his conversation with French phrases. His clothes were good, but now somewhat out of fashion: “in brief, there was every appearance of gentility on straitened means” (15: 70). He lives as what the Russians call a prizhivalchik, a sponger on more affluent relatives and friends, who continue to offer him hospitality because he is, after all, a gentleman; his manners are good, he can be presented in society, and he is agreeable, accommodating, and amusing. Such an image carries a symbolic meaning. Religion itself, from Dostoevsky’s point of view, was now a hanger-on in Russian educated society, accepted as a respectable relic of the past but hardly exercising its old power and influence. As the devil remarks himself, “it’s an axiom generally accepted in society that I am a fallen angel. . . . If I ever was, it must have been so long ago that there’s no harm in forgetting it” (15: 73).

  Ivan’s dialogue with the devil plays on the continual fluctuation between the stirrings of his conscience and the amorally Nihilistic conclusions that he has drawn from his refusal to accept God and immortality. The devil had first appeared to Ivan once he began to brood over his possible part in the murder, and in this sense the devil represents paradoxically (unlike any other treatment of this topos known to me) the voice of Ivan’s conscience revolting against his reason. Dostoevsky’s devil, however, does not preach moral sermons but ridicules the inconsistency between Ivan’s pangs of conscience and the ideas he has accepted and expounded. “Everything is permitted” for those who do not believe in God and immortality, and Ivan has rejected both. Why, then, should he be tormented by feelings of moral guilt that derive from such principles? The devil arrives to personify Ivan’s self-mockery of his own moral-psychic contradictions, which have driven him into what Dostoevsky called brain fever and we now diagnose as schizophrenia. Ivan will finally break down completely—but not before the devil has exhibited both Ivan’s longing for faith and the difficulty of attaining it for someone who refuses to accept any non-Euclidean world.

  The involutions of Ivan’s conversation with the devil are so intricate that it is impossible to give in brief any adequate account of their complexities. Essentially, however, its aim is to dramatize the antinomies in which Ivan is trapped once his conscience comes into clashing opposition with those rational convictions that give rise to his rebellion against God and Christ. The supreme irony, of course, is that it should be the devil who apparently leads him along the path to faith; and Ivan (who is of course speaking to himself through the devil) realizes all the incongruity of such a situation. As the devil remarks, “if you come to that, does proving there is a devil prove that there is a God?” Ivan insists all through the dialogue that the devil is only his hallucination and has no independent reality. “ ‘You are a lie, you are my illness, you are a phantom . . . you are my hallucination,’ he cries out” (15: 71–72). So long as Ivan believes this, he does not have to accept that the devil emanates from some non-Euclidean, irrational world of Christian faith; but the upsurge of moral conscience from which he has begun to suffer makes it impossible for him to dismiss such a possibility entirely.

  The devil himself both asserts his ontological reality, which Ivan vehemently denies, and then helps Ivan to reinforce such a denial. When Ivan accuses the devil of lying (!), the latter obligingly agrees: “Just so. But hesitation, suspense, conflict between belief and disbelief—is sometimes such a torture to a conscientious man, such as you are, that it’s better to hang oneself at once.” For Ivan’s benefit, the devil explains, he is using a “new method,” no longer the old one in which belief and disbelief were presented as polar opposites; now he is employing homeopathic medicine, in which small doses of a drug that augment the disease can result in a cure.3 “I lead you to belief and disbelief by turns,” the devil says; “as soon as you disbelieve in me completely, you’ll begin assuring me to my face that I cannot be a dream but a reality.” Reason may prevent Ivan from believing, but the moment he refuses, his moral conscience will drive him to the opposite pole despite all the conclusions of his logic. By this method the devil will sow in Ivan “only a tiny grain of faith and it will grow into an oak tree—and such an oak tree that, sitting on it, you will try to enter into the ranks of ‘the hermit monks and chaste women’ [a quote from Pushkin] for that is what you are secretly longing for. You’ll dine on locusts, you’ll wander in the wilderness to save your soul” (15: 80). Ivan’s devil knows him very well: this is precisely the path the Grand Inquisitor had followed before he lost his faith.

  The devil lives up to his reputation as an amiable and entertaining interlocutor, and several of his amusing, debonair anecdotes contain that combination of a scoffing skepticism with a yearning desire for faith that typify Ivan, though he is enraged at being confronted with himself in this guise through the devil’s repartee. Many of the devil’s sallies include parodies of one or another idea expressed by Ivan earlier, either in the chapter “Rebellion” or in his Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, and they are written with a satirical brio for which it would be hard to find any equal since Swift.

  One of the most expressive of these parodies manifestly takes off from Ivan’s indignant refusal to join in the “hosannahs” of the universal harmony, of the final reconciliation. It is contained in a legend that the devil recounts even though it is now out of date in his world (which he does not want Ivan to confuse with the earthly one, though he then immediately adds that there is no difference between the two). This legend could not be more explicit in depicting Ivan’s quandary, and its resolution ends on an ironic note that can be taken as a self-reflexive allusion to Dostoevsky himself. It involves “a thinker and philosopher” who on earth “rejected everything, ‘laws, conscience, faith’ [a citation from Griboyedov] and, above all, the future life.” Indignant at finding himself living such a future life after his death, he protested and was punished by being told that he would have to walk a quadrillion kilometers before reaching the gates of heaven and being forgiven.

  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.