IV. Rebellion

“There is a confession I must make to you,” Ivan began. “I have never been able to understand how a person can love his neighbors. It is precisely one’s neighbors, in my view, that one cannot possibly love; only those far off, perhaps. I read once, somewhere or other, about ‘John the Merciful’ (a saint), that when a hungry and frozen passerby came to him and asked to be warmed, he lay down with him in his bed, put his arms around him, and began breathing into his mouth, which was festering and foul-smelling from some terrible disease. I am convinced that he did it with the strain of a lie, out of love ordered by duty, out of a penance he had dragged onto himself. For anyone to love a man, the man must hide himself; the moment he shows his face—love is gone.”

“The elder Zosima spoke of that more than once,” Alyosha remarked. “He also said that a man’s face often hinders many people still inexperienced in love from loving. But there is a great deal of love in mankind, you know, and almost like the love of Christ; I know that myself, Ivan…”

“Well, I don’t know it yet, and I can’t understand it, and countless numbers of people are with me in that. The question, you see, is whether this comes from people’s bad qualities or whether it is simply their nature. In my view, Christ’s love for people is a miracle of its own kind, impossible on earth. True, he was God. But we aren’t gods. Suppose, for instance, I can suffer deeply, but another can never know to what degree I suffer, because he is another and not I, and, besides that, a man will seldom agree to acknowledge another as a sufferer (as if it were a rank). Why won’t he agree, what do you think? Because, for instance, I smell bad, because I have a stupid face, because I once stepped on his foot. Besides, there is suffering and suffering: a humiliating suffering, one that degrades me, hunger for instance, my benefactor will still allow me, but a suffering a little higher, for an idea for instance, no, that he will allow only in rare cases, because he will look at me, for instance, and suddenly see that I don’t have the sort of face at all that, according to his fancy, a man suffering for such and such an idea ought to have. And so he deprives me at once of his benefactions, and not even out of a wicked heart. Beggars, especially noble beggars, ought never to show themselves in public, but should ask for alms through the newspapers. One can still love one’s neighbor in the abstract, and even sometimes from a distance, but up close almost never. If everything were as it is on the stage, in a ballet, where beggars, when they appear, come in silk rags and torn lace and ask for alms dancing gracefully, well, then one could still admire them. Admire them, but still not love them. But enough of that. I only needed to put you at my point of view. I wanted to speak about the suffering of mankind in general, but we’d better stop at the sufferings of children alone. That reduces the scope of my argument by some ten times, but still, better children alone. So much the worse for me, of course. But, in the first place, little children can be loved even up close, even dirty ones, even ugly ones (though it seems to me that little children are never ugly). In the second place, I won’t speak of grown-ups also because, besides being disgusting and undeserving of love, they have a retribution: they ate the apple and knew good and evil and became ‘like gods.’ They go on eating it even now. But the little children haven’t eaten anything and so far are guilty of nothing. Do you love little children, Alyosha? I know you do, and you will understand why I want to speak only of them now. If they too suffer terribly on earth, it is, of course, for their fathers, they are punished for their fathers, who ate the apple—but that is reasoning from another world; to the human heart here on earth it is incomprehensible. An innocent one must not suffer for another, and such an innocent one at that! Marvel at me, Alyosha, I too love little children terribly. And note this: cruel people, passionate, carnivorous, Karamazovian, sometimes love children very much. Children, while they are children, up to seven, for instance, stand terribly far from people: just as if they were a different creature with a different nature. I knew a robber in prison: in the course of his career it had happened that, while slaughtering whole families in the houses he broke into at night to rob, he had cut the throats of several children as well. But sitting in prison, he loved them to a strange degree. From the prison window he did nothing but watch the children playing in the prison yard. One little boy he taught to come to him under his window, and the boy became great friends with him… You don’t know why I’m saying all this, Alyosha? My head aches somehow, and I feel sad.”

“You speak with a strange look,” Alyosha remarked uneasily, “as if you were in some sort of madness.”

“By the way, a Bulgarian in Moscow told me recently,” Ivan Fyodorovich went on, as though not listening to his brother, “how the Turks and Circassians there, in Bulgaria, are committing atrocities everywhere, fearing a general uprising of the Slavs—that is, they burn, they cut throats, they rape women and children, they nail prisoners to fences by the ears and leave them like that until morning, and in the morning they hang them—and so on, it’s impossible even to imagine it all. Indeed, people sometimes speak of man’s ‘bestial’ cruelty, but that is terribly unjust and insulting to the beasts: no beast could ever be as cruel as man, so artfully, so artistically cruel. A tiger simply gnaws, tears, and that is all it knows how to do. It would never even enter its head to nail people by the ears overnight, even if it could do it. These Turks, among other things, tortured children too with sensual pleasure, beginning with cutting them out of the mother’s womb with a dagger, down to tossing nursing infants up in the air and catching them on a bayonet before their mothers’ eyes. Doing it before the mothers’ eyes was the chief delight. But here, though, is a little picture that interested me very much. Imagine: a nursing infant in the arms of its trembling mother, and around them the Turks who have come in. They have thought up an amusing little trick: they pet the baby, they laugh to get it laughing, they manage it, the baby has laughed. That instant a Turk aims a pistol at it, four vershoks, some seven inches, from its face. The little boy laughs joyfully, stretches out his little hands to grab the pistol, and suddenly the artist pulls the trigger right in his face and shatters his little head. Artistic, isn’t it? By the way, the Turks, they say, are very fond of sweets.”

“Brother, what is all this for?” asked Alyosha.

“I think that if the devil doesn’t exist and, therefore, man has created him, then he has created him in his own image and likeness.”

“In that case, just as he did God.”

“Ah, you’re wonderfully good at turning little words around, as Polonius says in Hamlet,” laughed Ivan. “You’ve caught me at my word; so be it, I’m glad. A fine God yours is, then, if man created him in his own image and likeness. A moment ago you wanted to know what all this is for: I am, you see, a lover and collector of certain little facts, and, would you believe it, I write down and collect from newspapers and stories, from wherever I happen on them, a certain sort of little anecdote, and I already have a good collection. The Turks, of course, have gone into the collection, but they are all foreigners. I have some home-grown items too, even better than the Turkish ones. You know, with us it is more beating, more the birch and the lash, and that is national: with us ears nailed to fences are unthinkable, we are Europeans after all, but the birch, the lash—that is something of our own and cannot be taken from us. Abroad they seem to have stopped beating altogether now; whether morals have been purified, or laws have been so arranged that one man doesn’t seem to dare flog another anymore, but to make up for it they have rewarded themselves with something else, and also purely national, as with us, and so national that with us it seems almost impossible, though, it seems, it is taking root here too, especially since the religious movement in our high society. I have a charming little pamphlet, translated from the French, about how in Geneva, very recently, only some five years ago, they executed a villain and murderer, Richard, a lad of twenty-three, it seems, who repented and turned to the Christian faith right at the foot of the scaffold. This Richard was somebody’s illegitimate child, whom his parents, when he was still a babe of about six, made a present of to some Swiss mountain shepherds, and they raised him in order to use him for work. He grew up among them like a little wild animal; the shepherds taught him nothing; on the contrary, at seven they were already sending him out to graze the flock, in the wet and the cold, almost without clothes and almost without feeding him. And of course, in doing so, none of them stopped to think or repented; on the contrary, each considered himself fully within his rights, for Richard had been given to them as a thing, and they did not even find it necessary to feed him. Richard himself testifies that in those years, like the prodigal son in the Gospel, he wanted terribly to eat at least some of the mash that was given to the pigs being fattened for sale, but they did not give him even that and beat him when he stole from the pigs; and so he spent his whole childhood and his whole youth, until he grew up and, having gained strength, went out stealing on his own. The savage began earning money by day labor in Geneva, drank what he earned, lived like a monster, and ended by killing some old man and robbing him. He was caught, tried, and condemned to death. They don’t go in for sentimentality over there. And so in prison he is immediately surrounded by pastors and members of various Christian brotherhoods, charitable ladies, and so on. In prison they taught him to read and write, began expounding the Gospel to him, appealed to his conscience, persuaded him, pressed him, nagged him, crushed him, and so at last he solemnly confesses his crime himself. He was converted; with his own hand he wrote to the court that he was a monster and that at last he had been found worthy of having the Lord illumine him too and send him grace. All Geneva was in a stir, all charitable and pious Geneva. All that was highest and best bred rushed to him in prison; they kiss Richard, embrace him: ‘You are our brother, grace has descended upon you!’ And Richard himself only weeps with emotion: ‘Yes, grace has descended upon me! Before, all my childhood and my youth, I was glad of the pigs’ food, but now grace has descended upon me too, I die in the Lord!’ ‘Yes, yes, Richard, die in the Lord; you have shed blood, and in the Lord you must die. Though you are not guilty of not knowing the Lord at all when you envied the pigs their food and when you were beaten for stealing their food from them (which was very wrong of you, for stealing is not permitted)—still, you have shed blood and must die.’ And so the last day comes. Richard, gone weak, weeps and does nothing but repeat every minute: ‘This is the best of my days, I go to the Lord!’ ‘Yes,’ the pastors cry, the judges, and the charitable ladies, ‘this is your happiest day, for you are going to the Lord!’ All of them move toward the scaffold after the shameful cart in which Richard is being taken, in carriages, on foot. Now they have reached the scaffold: ‘Die, our brother,’ they cry to Richard, ‘die in the Lord, for grace has descended upon you too!’ And so, covered with his brothers’ kisses, brother Richard was dragged up onto the scaffold, laid on the guillotine, and they went and chopped off his head in a brotherly way, because grace had descended upon him too. No, it is characteristic. The pamphlet was translated into Russian by certain Russian philanthropists of high society with Lutheran leanings and sent out free with newspapers and other publications for the enlightenment of the Russian people. The business with Richard is good because it is national. With us, though it is absurd to chop off a brother’s head only because he has become our brother and grace has descended upon him, still, I repeat, we have our own, which is very nearly as good. With us there is a historical, direct, and most intimate delight in torture by beating. Nekrasov has some lines about a peasant flogging a horse across the eyes with a knout, ‘across its gentle eyes.’ Who hasn’t seen that, it is a Russianism. He describes how a feeble little nag, overloaded, has got stuck with its cart and can’t pull it out. The peasant beats it, beats it furiously, beats it at last without understanding what he is doing; drunk with beating, he lashes it painfully, countless times: ‘You may not have the strength, but pull, die, but pull!’ The little nag strains, and then he begins lashing it, defenseless as it is, across its weeping, its ‘gentle eyes.’ Beside itself, it gave a heave and pulled the cart out and went on, trembling all over, not breathing, somehow sideways, with a kind of hopping gait, somehow unnaturally and shamefully—in Nekrasov it is horrible. But that is only a horse, and God himself gave us horses to be flogged. So the Tatars explained to us, and they made us a present of the knout to remember them by. But people, too, can be flogged, you know. And so an intelligent, educated gentleman and his lady flog their own little daughter, a babe of seven, with birch rods—I have it written down in detail. Papa is glad that the switches have knots in them, ‘it’ll sting the better,’ he says, and so he starts ‘stinging’ his own daughter. I know for certain that there are floggers who grow more heated with every stroke, to the point of sensual pleasure, of literal sensual pleasure, more and more with each successive stroke, progressively. They flog for a minute, they flog, finally, for five minutes, they flog for ten minutes, on and on, more, faster, stinging harder. The child screams, the child at last cannot scream, she gasps: ‘Papa, Papa, Papa dear, Papa dear!’ Through some damned indecent chance the affair gets to court. A lawyer is hired. The Russian people long ago gave the lawyer a name among us: ‘the abvocate, a hired conscience.’ The lawyer shouts in his client’s defense. ‘The case,’ he says, ‘is such a simple one, a family matter, an ordinary one: a father flogged his daughter, and now, to the shame of our times, it has come to court!’ The convinced jurors withdraw and bring in a verdict of not guilty. The public roars with happiness that the torturer has been acquitted. Ee-ekh, I wasn’t there, I would have bellowed out a proposal to found a scholarship in honor of the torturer’s name! Charming pictures. But about little children I have still better ones; I have collected a great, great deal about Russian children, Alyosha. A little girl, a five-year-old, was hated by her father and mother, ‘most honorable people of official rank, educated and well brought up.’ You see, I positively assert once more that there is a peculiar quality in many people in mankind—a love of torturing children, but children only. Toward all other subjects of the human race these same torturers behave even benevolently and meekly, like educated and humane European people, but they are very fond of tormenting children, they even love children themselves in this sense. It is precisely the defenselessness of these creatures that tempts the tormentors, the angelic trustfulness of a child, who has nowhere to go and no one to go to—that is just what inflames the vile blood of the torturer. In every man, of course, a beast lies hidden, a beast of rage, a beast of sensual inflammation at the cries of the tortured victim, a beast let off the chain without restraint, a beast of diseases contracted in debauchery, gout, bad livers, and so on. This poor five-year-old girl was subjected to every possible torture by those educated parents. They beat her, flogged her, kicked her, not knowing why themselves, turned her whole body into bruises; at last they arrived at the highest refinement: in the cold, in the frost, they locked her up all night in the privy, and because she did not ask at night to be taken to relieve herself (as if a five-year-old child, sleeping its angelic sound sleep, could have learned to ask at that age)—for that they smeared her whole face with her excrement and made her eat that excrement, and it was the mother, the mother who made her! And this mother could sleep when the groans of the poor little child, locked in that vile place, could be heard at night! Do you understand that, when a little creature, who cannot even make sense yet of what is being done to her, beats her strained little breast in that vile place, in the dark and the cold, with her tiny fist, and weeps her bloody, unresentful, meek little tears to ‘dear God’ to protect her—do you understand this drivel, my friend and my brother, my meek and humble novice of God, do you understand why this drivel is so needed and has been created! Without it, they say, man could not even have stayed on earth, for he would not have known good and evil. What need is there to know this damned good and evil, when it costs so much? Why, then the whole world of knowledge is not worth those little tears of the child to ‘dear God.’ I’m not speaking of the sufferings of grown-ups, they ate the apple, and to hell with them, and let the devil take them all, but these, these! I’m tormenting you, Alyoshka, you don’t seem yourself. I’ll stop if you like.”

“Never mind, I want to be tormented too,” muttered Alyosha.

“One, just one more little picture, and that out of curiosity, it’s so very characteristic, and the main thing is, I have only just read it in one of our collections of antiquities, in the Archive, or Antiquity, or whichever, I must look it up, I’ve even forgotten where I read it. It was in the darkest time of serfdom, back at the start of the century, and long live the liberator of the people! At that time, at the start of the century, there lived a general, a general with great connections and a very wealthy landowner, but one of those (true, even then there were, it seems, very few of them) who, retiring from the service, were all but convinced that they had earned the right of life and death over their subjects. There were such men then. Well, so the general lives on his estate of two thousand souls, puts on airs, treats his smaller neighbors as his hangers-on and buffoons. He has kennels with hundreds of hounds and nearly a hundred handlers, all in uniform, all mounted. And then a house serf’s boy, a little boy, only eight years old, somehow, while playing, threw a stone and injured the leg of the general’s favorite hound. ‘Why has my favorite dog gone lame?’ It is reported to him that this very boy, they say, threw a stone at it and injured its leg. ‘So it was you,’ the general looked him over. ‘Take him!’ They took him, took him from his mother, he spent the whole night in the lockup, and in the morning, at daybreak, the general rides out in full dress for the hunt, mounts his horse, around him his hangers-on, his dogs, his handlers, his huntsmen, all on horseback. Around them the house serfs have been assembled for their edification, and in front of them all the mother of the guilty boy. The boy is led out of the lockup. A gloomy, cold, misty autumn day, a splendid day for hunting. The general orders the boy undressed, the little child is stripped stark naked, he trembles, he is out of his mind with fear, he dares not make a sound… ‘Drive him!’ commands the general. ‘Run, run!’ the handlers shout to him, and the boy runs… ‘Sic him!’ howls the general, and he looses the whole pack of borzoi hounds on him. He hunted him down before his mother’s eyes, and the dogs tore the child to pieces!… The general, it seems, was placed under trusteeship. Well… what should be done with him? Shoot him? Shoot him to satisfy our moral feeling? Speak, Alyoshka!”

“Shoot him!” Alyosha said quietly, raising his eyes to his brother with a pale, somehow twisted smile.

“Bravo!” Ivan howled in a sort of rapture. “Since you have said it, then… Well done, schema-monk! So that is the kind of little demon sitting in your little heart, Alyoshka Karamazov!”

“What I said was absurd, but…”

“That’s just it, that ‘but’…” Ivan was shouting. “Know, novice, that absurdities are all too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would have happened in it. We know what we know!”

“What do you know?”

“I understand nothing,” Ivan went on as though in delirium, “and I don’t want to understand anything now. I want to stay with the fact. I decided long ago not to understand. If I want to understand anything, I shall at once betray the fact, and I have decided to stay with the fact…”

“Why are you testing me?” Alyosha exclaimed sorrowfully, with strain. “Will you tell me at last?”

“Of course I’ll tell you, that’s what I was leading up to, to tell you. You are dear to me, I don’t want to let you slip away, and I won’t give you up to your Zosima.”

Ivan was silent for a minute; his face suddenly became very sad.

“Listen to me: I took children only so as to make it more obvious. Of the other human tears with which the whole earth is soaked from its crust to its center, I won’t say a single word; I have narrowed my theme on purpose. I am a bedbug, and I acknowledge in all humility that I cannot understand why everything is arranged as it is. People themselves are to blame, then: they were given paradise, they wanted freedom, and they stole fire from heaven, knowing themselves that they would become unhappy, so there is no reason to pity them. Oh, by my mind, my pitiful, earthly Euclidean mind, I know only that there is suffering, that no one is to blame, that one thing follows from another straight and simply, that everything flows and finds its balance—but that is only Euclidean nonsense, I know that, after all, and I can’t agree to live by it, can I! What is it to me that no one is to blame and that I know it—I need retribution, or else I shall destroy myself. And retribution not in infinity somewhere, sometime, but here, on earth, and so that I see it myself. I have believed, I want to see for myself, and if I am already dead by that hour, then let them raise me up, for if it all takes place without me, it will be too galling. I did not suffer, surely, just so that I, with my villainies and my sufferings, should manure some future harmony for somebody. With my own eyes I want to see the hind lie down beside the lion, and the slain man rise up and embrace the one who killed him. I want to be there when everyone suddenly learns what it has all been for. All the religions on earth are founded on this desire, and I believe. But here, though, are the children, and what am I to do with them then? That is a question I cannot resolve. For the hundredth time I repeat—there are a multitude of questions, but I have taken only the children, because here what I need to say is irresistibly clear. Listen: if everyone must suffer in order to buy eternal harmony with suffering, what have children to do with it, tell me, please? It is entirely incomprehensible why they too should have to suffer, and why they should buy harmony with their sufferings. Why should they too have gone into the material and manured some future harmony for somebody with themselves? I understand solidarity in sin among people, I understand solidarity in retribution as well, but surely not solidarity in sin with little children, and if the truth really is that they share in their fathers’ solidarity in all their fathers’ villainies, then, of course, that truth is not of this world, and it is incomprehensible to me. Some joker will say, perhaps, that the child will grow up all the same and have time to sin, but there you are, he didn’t grow up, at eight years old he was run down by dogs. Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I do understand what a shaking of the universe it must be when everything in heaven and under the earth merges into one voice of praise, and everything that lives and has lived cries out: ‘You are just, O Lord, for your ways have been revealed!’ When the mother embraces the torturer who had her son torn apart by his dogs, and all three proclaim with tears: ‘You are just, O Lord,’ then, of course, knowledge will have reached its crown, and all will be explained. But that is just where the snag is, that is just what I cannot accept. And while I am on earth, I hasten to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really will happen that when I myself live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I myself, perhaps, will cry out with all the rest, looking at the mother embracing her child’s torturer: ‘You are just, O Lord!’ But I don’t want to cry out then. While there is still time, I make haste to fence myself off, and so I give up the higher harmony entirely. It is not worth a child’s tear, the little tear of even that one tormented child who beat her breast with her little fist and prayed in her stinking hole with her unatoned little tears to ‘dear God’! It is not worth it, because those little tears remained unatoned. They must be atoned for, or else there can be no harmony. But with what, with what will you atone for them? Is it possible? Can it be by their being avenged? But what do I want with their being avenged, what do I want with hell for the torturers, what can hell set right here, when those children have already been tortured? And what sort of harmony is it, if there is hell: I want to forgive, and I want to embrace, I don’t want there to be more suffering. And if the sufferings of children went to make up the sum of suffering that was necessary for buying truth, then I assert beforehand that all of truth is not worth such a price. I don’t want, finally, the mother to embrace the torturer who had her son torn apart by dogs! She dare not forgive him! If she wants to, let her forgive him for herself, let her forgive the torturer her own immeasurable mother’s suffering; but the sufferings of her child, torn to pieces, she has no right to forgive those; she dare not forgive the torturer, not even if the child himself forgave him! And if that is so, if they dare not forgive, where then is harmony? Is there in the whole world a being who could forgive and would have the right to? I don’t want harmony; out of love for mankind I don’t want it. I would rather remain with sufferings unavenged. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and my unquenched indignation, even if I am wrong. Besides, they have put too high a price on harmony; it is not within our means at all to pay so much for admission. And so I hasten to give back my ticket of admission. And if I am an honest man, then I am bound to give it back as far in advance as possible. And that is what I am doing. It isn’t God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, I am only most respectfully returning him the ticket.”

“That is rebellion,” Alyosha said quietly, with lowered eyes.

“Rebellion? I wouldn’t want that word from you,” Ivan said with feeling. “Can one live by rebellion? And I want to live. Tell me yourself, straight out, I call on you—answer: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the aim of making people happy in the end, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that it would be necessary and unavoidable to torture to death only one tiny little creature, that very little child who beat her breast with her little fist, and to found that edifice on her unavenged tears; would you agree to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and don’t lie!”

“No, I would not agree,” Alyosha said quietly.

“And can you admit the idea that the people for whom you are building would themselves agree to accept their happiness on the unjustified blood of a little tortured child, and, having accepted it, remain happy forever?”

“No, I can’t admit it. Brother,” Alyosha suddenly said, his eyes flashing, “you said just now: is there in the whole world a being who could forgive and would have the right to? But there is such a being, and he can forgive everything, everyone and all, and for everything, because he himself gave his innocent blood for all and for everything. You have forgotten him, and it is on him that the edifice will be founded, and it is to him that they will cry out: ‘You are just, O Lord, for your ways have been revealed.’”

“Ah, that is ‘the only sinless one’ and his blood! No, I haven’t forgotten him; on the contrary, I have been wondering all the while why you didn’t bring him out for so long, for in arguments all your people usually put him forward first of all. You know, Alyosha, don’t laugh, about a year ago I once made up a poem. If you can spare me another ten minutes or so, shall I tell it to you?”

“You wrote a poem?”

“Oh no, I didn’t write it,” laughed Ivan, “and never in my life have I composed even two lines of verse. But I made this poem up and remembered it. I made it up with passion. You will be my first reader, that is, listener. Why indeed should an author lose even a single listener?” Ivan grinned. “Shall I tell it or not?”

“I’m listening hard,” said Alyosha.

“My poem is called ‘The Grand Inquisitor’; it’s an absurd thing, but I want to share it with you.”