IX. The Devil. Ivan Fyodorovich’s Nightmare

I am not a doctor, and yet I feel that the moment has come when it is absolutely necessary for me to explain to the reader at least something about the nature of Ivan Fyodorovich’s illness. Running ahead, I will say only one thing: that evening he was precisely on the very eve of delirium tremens, which had at last taken full possession of his constitution, long since disordered but stubbornly resisting the illness. Knowing nothing of medicine, I will venture the guess that perhaps he really had managed, by a terrible exertion of his will, to hold the illness off for a time, dreaming, of course, of overcoming it altogether. He knew he was unwell, but he was loath to be ill at this time, in these approaching fateful moments of his life, when he had to be present, to speak his word boldly and decisively, and himself “to justify himself to himself.” He did, however, go once to the new doctor who had come from Moscow, sent for by Katerina Ivanovna as a result of one of her fancies, which I have already mentioned above. The doctor, having listened to him and examined him, concluded that he had something like, even, a sort of disorder of the brain, and was not in the least surprised by a certain admission that Ivan Fyodorovich, though with loathing, made to him. “Hallucinations are quite possible in your condition,” the doctor decided, “though they ought to be verified… in general, though, you must begin treatment seriously, without losing a minute, or things will go badly.” But Ivan Fyodorovich, on leaving him, did not follow this sensible advice and would not trouble to take to his bed for treatment: “I’m on my feet, after all, I still have my strength for now; if I collapse, that’s another matter, then let anyone who likes treat me,” he decided, with a wave of his hand. And so he was sitting there now, almost aware himself that he was delirious, and, as I have already said, staring stubbornly at some object by the opposite wall, on the sofa. There, suddenly, someone turned out to be sitting, who had come in God knows how, because he had not been in the room when Ivan Fyodorovich, coming back from Smerdyakov’s, walked into it. It was some sort of gentleman or, to put it better, a certain kind of Russian gentleman, no longer young, qui frisait la cinquantaine (edging toward fifty), as the French say, with not very much gray in his dark, rather long, and still thick hair and in a trimmed, pointed little beard. He was wearing a sort of brown jacket, evidently from the best tailor but already worn, made around the year before last and completely out of fashion, so that for two years now no well-to-do man of society had worn anything like it. His linen, his long scarf-like tie, everything was just as it is with all stylish gentlemen, but the linen, if you looked closer, was a bit dirty, and the wide scarf was very threadbare. The visitor’s checked trousers fit superbly, but were, again, too light and somehow too narrow, as people had already stopped wearing them, and the same went for the soft, white, fluffy hat the visitor had brought along with him, much too out of season. In a word, he had the look of respectability on very slender pocket means. It looked as though the gentleman belonged to the class of former idle landowners who had flourished in the days of serfdom; a man who had evidently seen the world and decent society, had once had connections and had perhaps kept them even now, but who, little by little, as he grew poorer after a gay life in his youth and the recent abolition of serfdom, had turned into a sort of hanger-on of good tone, going the rounds of kind old acquaintances who took him in for his easygoing, accommodating character, and also in view of the fact that he was, after all, a decent man who could be seated at one’s table in anyone’s company, though of course in a modest place. Such hangers-on, gentlemen of accommodating character, who know how to tell a story, make up a table at cards, and decidedly dislike any errands if anyone tries to saddle them with one, are usually alone in the world, either bachelors or widowers, perhaps with children, but their children are always being brought up somewhere far away, with some aunts or other, whom the gentleman almost never mentions in decent society, as though a little ashamed of such relations. Little by little he gets entirely out of the habit of his children, receiving from them now and then letters of congratulation for his name day and for Christmas, and sometimes even answering them. The face of the unexpected visitor was not exactly good-natured, but, again, accommodating and ready, depending on circumstances, for any amiable expression. He wore no watch, but he had a tortoiseshell lorgnette on a black ribbon. A massive gold ring set with an inexpensive opal adorned the middle finger of his right hand. Ivan Fyodorovich kept an angry silence and did not want to begin a conversation. The visitor waited and sat exactly like a hanger-on who has just come downstairs from the room assigned to him to keep his host company at tea, but keeps meekly silent in view of the fact that the host is busy and is frowning over some thought; ready, however, for any amiable conversation, the moment the host begins it. Suddenly his face expressed something like a sudden concern.

“Listen,” he began to Ivan Fyodorovich, “forgive me, I only want to remind you: you went to Smerdyakov’s, you know, in order to find out about Katerina Ivanovna, and you came away without finding out anything about her, you must have forgotten…”

“Ah, yes!” Ivan suddenly burst out, and his face darkened with worry. “Yes, I forgot… Still, it makes no difference now, everything waits till tomorrow,” he muttered to himself. “And you,” he turned irritably to his visitor, “I was just about to remember that myself, because that is precisely what was weighing on me so! Why did you pop up? Am I really going to believe that it was you who prompted me, and not I who remembered it myself?”

“Then don’t believe it,” the gentleman smiled kindly. “What sort of faith is it that comes by force? Besides, in matters of faith no proofs are any help, especially material ones. Thomas believed not because he saw the risen Christ, but because he had wanted to believe even before. Take the spiritualists, for instance… I’m very fond of them… imagine, they suppose they’re useful to the faith, because devils show them their little horns from the other world. ‘That,’ they say, ‘is already, so to speak, material proof that the other world exists.’ The other world and material proofs, tra-la-la! And besides, if the devil is proved, it’s still not known whether God is proved, is it? I want to join an idealist society, I’ll be the opposition among them: ‘a realist, you see, not a materialist, heh-heh!’”

“Listen,” Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly got up from the table. “I’m like a man in delirium now… and, of course, I am delirious… lie as much as you like, it’s all the same to me! You won’t drive me into a frenzy, as you did last time. Only I feel ashamed of something… I want to walk about the room… Sometimes I don’t see you and don’t even hear your voice, as last time, but I always guess what you’re babbling, because it is I, I myself who am speaking, and not you! Only I don’t know whether I was asleep last time or saw you awake. Here, I’ll wet a towel in cold water and put it to my head, and perhaps you’ll evaporate.”

Ivan Fyodorovich went to the corner, took a towel, did as he had said, and began pacing back and forth across the room with the wet towel on his head.

“I like it that you and I went straight to the familiar you,” the visitor began.

“Fool,” Ivan laughed, “what, am I supposed to use the formal you with you? I’m in good spirits now, only my temple aches… and the top of my head… only please don’t philosophize, as you did last time. If you can’t clear out, then tell some cheerful lie. Gossip, you’re a hanger-on, so gossip. What a nightmare to get saddled with! But I’m not afraid of you. I’ll get the better of you. They won’t cart me off to the madhouse!”

“C’est charmant, a hanger-on. Yes, that is just what I am, in my own character. What am I on earth if not a hanger-on? By the way, I listen to you, you know, and I’m a little surprised: by God, it’s as if you’re already beginning, little by little, to take me for something that really is, and not merely for your fantasy, as you insisted last time…”

“Not for one minute do I take you for the real truth,” Ivan cried, even somehow furiously. “You’re a lie, you’re my sickness, you’re a phantom. Only I don’t know how to destroy you, and I see I shall have to suffer for a while. You are my hallucination. You are the embodiment of myself, but only of one side of me, though… of my thoughts and feelings, but only the most loathsome and stupid ones. From that side you might even be of interest to me, if only I had time to bother with you…”

“Allow me, allow me, I’ll catch you out: this evening by the streetlamp, when you flew at Alyosha and shouted at him, ‘You found out from him! How did you find out that he comes to see me?’ It was me you were remembering then, you know. So for one tiny little instant you did believe, you believed that I really am,” the gentleman laughed softly.

“Yes, that was a weakness of nature… but I could not believe in you. I don’t know if I was sleeping or up and walking about last time. Maybe I only saw you in a dream then, and not awake at all…”

“And why were you so harsh with him this evening, with Alyosha? He’s a dear; I am guilty before him on account of the elder Zosima.”

“Not a word about Alyosha! How dare you, you lackey!” Ivan laughed again.

“You curse, and yet you laugh—a good sign. You are, however, much more amiable with me today than last time, and I understand why: that great decision…”

“Not a word about the decision!” Ivan cried savagely.

“I understand, I understand, c’est noble, c’est charmant, you are going tomorrow to defend your brother and you are sacrificing yourself… c’est chevaleresque (it’s chivalrous).”

“Be quiet, or I’ll kick you!”

“I shall be partly glad, for then my aim will have been achieved: if it comes to kicks, that means you believe in my reality, because no one kicks a phantom. Joking aside: it’s all the same to me, you know, curse if you like, but still it would be better to be a tiny drop more polite, even with me. As it is, fool and lackey, really, what words!”

“In cursing you I curse myself!” Ivan laughed again. “You are I, my own self, only with a different mug. You say precisely what I already think… and you are incapable of telling me anything new!”

“If I coincide with you in my thoughts, that only does me honor,” the gentleman said with delicacy and dignity.

“Only you take all my nasty thoughts, and above all, the stupid ones. You are stupid and vulgar. You are terribly stupid. No, I can’t bear you! What am I to do, what am I to do!” Ivan ground out through his teeth.

“My friend, I still want to be a gentleman and to be received as one,” the visitor began, in a fit of a certain purely hanger-on’s vanity, good-natured and ready in advance to give way. “I am poor, but… I won’t say very honest, but… it is usually accepted in society as an axiom that I am a fallen angel. By God, I can’t imagine how I could ever have been an angel. If I ever was one, it was so long ago that it’s no sin to forget it. Now I value only my reputation as a decent man, and I live as best I can, trying to be agreeable. I love people sincerely—oh, I have been slandered in many things! Here, when from time to time I move in with you, my life flows by like something that, as it were, really is, and that is what I like most of all. For I myself, just like you, suffer from the fantastic, and that is why I love your earthly realism. Here with you everything is outlined, here there is a formula, here there is geometry, while with us it is all some sort of indeterminate equations! I walk about here and dream. I love to dream. Besides, on earth I become superstitious—please don’t laugh: that is precisely what I like, that I become superstitious. Here I take on all your habits: I have grown fond of going to the public baths, can you imagine that, and I love to steam myself with merchants and priests. My dream is to become incarnate, but once and for all, irrevocably, in some fat merchant’s wife weighing seven poods, and to believe everything she believes. My ideal is to go into a church and light a candle with all my heart, by God it is. That would be the end of my sufferings. Then, too, I have come to love taking cures with you: in the spring there was smallpox going around, and I went to the foundling home and had myself vaccinated—if you knew how pleased I was that day: I donated ten rubles to our Slav brothers!… But you’re not listening. You know, you seem very much out of sorts today,” the gentleman fell silent for a moment. “I know you went to see that doctor yesterday… well, how is your health? What did the doctor tell you?”

“Fool!” Ivan snapped.

“Whereas you, my, how clever you are. Cursing again? I wasn’t asking out of sympathy, you know, just so. You needn’t answer, if you like. Now the rheumatism has started up again…”

“Fool,” Ivan repeated again.

“You keep on with the same thing, but last year I caught such a rheumatism that I still remember it.”

“The devil has rheumatism?”

“Why not, if I sometimes become incarnate? I become incarnate, so I take the consequences. Satana sum et nihil humanum a me alienum puto (I am Satan, and I count nothing human alien to me).”¹

“What, what? Satana sum et nihil humanum… that’s not bad for a devil!”

“I’m glad I’ve pleased you at last.”

“But you didn’t take that from me,” Ivan suddenly stopped, as if struck. “That never entered my head, that’s strange…”

“C’est du nouveau, n’est-ce pas? (That’s something new, isn’t it?) This time I shall act honestly and explain it to you. Listen: in dreams, and especially in nightmares, well, from an upset stomach or whatever, a man sometimes sees such artistic dreams, such a complex and real actuality, such events or even a whole world of events, bound together by such a plot, with such unexpected details, from the loftiest of your manifestations down to the last button on a shirtfront, that, I swear to you, Leo Tolstoy could not invent it, and yet such dreams are sometimes seen by people who are not writers at all, the most ordinary people, officials, newspaper columnists, priests… There is even a whole problem about it: one minister even confessed to me himself that all his best ideas come to him when he is asleep. Well, so it is now. Though I am your hallucination, still, as in a nightmare, I say original things that have never entered your head till now, so that I am not repeating your thoughts at all, and yet I am only your nightmare and nothing more.”

“You’re lying. Your aim is precisely to convince me that you exist on your own and are not my nightmare, and now you yourself confirm that you are a dream.”

“My friend, today I have adopted a special method, I’ll explain it to you later. Wait, where did I leave off? Yes, so I caught a cold that time, only not here with you but still over there…”

“Where over there? Tell me, will you be staying with me long, can’t you go away?” Ivan exclaimed, almost in despair. He stopped walking, sat down on the sofa, again leaned his elbows on the table, and squeezed his head with both hands. He tore the wet towel off and flung it aside in vexation: evidently it was no help.

“Your nerves are upset,” the gentleman observed with a casually offhand but, for all that, perfectly friendly air. “You’re cross with me even for having caught a cold, and yet it came about in the most natural way. I was in a hurry that time to get to a diplomatic soirée given by a certain highly placed Petersburg lady who had her sights set on a ministry. Well, tailcoat, white tie, gloves, and yet I was still God knows where, and to get to you on earth I still had to fly across space… of course, it’s only an instant, but then a ray of light from the sun takes a whole eight minutes, and here I was, imagine, in a tailcoat and an open waistcoat. Spirits don’t freeze, but once one has become incarnate, then… in a word, I was frivolous and set off, and in those spaces, you know, in the ether, in that water that was above the firmament—why, it’s such a frost… I mean, what do you mean frost, you can’t even call it frost anymore, can you imagine: a hundred and fifty degrees below zero! You know the village girls’ amusement: in thirty degrees of frost they invite a newcomer to lick an ax; the tongue freezes to it instantly, and the dolt tears the skin off it till it bleeds; and that is only at thirty degrees, but at a hundred and fifty, why, I think you’d only have to put a finger to the ax and it would be gone, if only… an ax could happen to be there…”

“And can an ax happen to be there?” Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly interrupted, absently and with disgust. He was resisting with all his might so as not to believe in his delirium and not to fall into madness for good.

“An ax?” the visitor asked again in surprise.

“Yes, yes, what would become of an ax there?” Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly cried with a sort of savage and insistent stubbornness.

“What would become of an ax in space? Quelle idée! (What an idea!) If it got far enough out, I suppose it would start flying around the Earth without knowing why itself, in the form of a satellite. The astronomers would calculate the rising and setting of the ax, Gattsuk would put it in his calendar, and that’s all.”

“You’re stupid, you’re terribly stupid!” Ivan said obstinately. “Lie more cleverly, or I won’t listen. You want to overpower me with realism, to convince me that you are, but I don’t want to believe that you are! I won’t believe it!!”

“But I’m not lying, it’s all true; unfortunately, the truth is almost always unwitty. I see you decidedly expect something great from me, and perhaps something beautiful as well. That is a great pity, because I give only what I can.”

“Don’t philosophize, you ass!”

“What philosophy, when my whole right side is paralyzed and I moan and groan? I’ve been to all the medical men: they know splendidly how to diagnose, they’ll tell you your whole illness as if counting it off on their fingers, but as for curing, that they can’t do. There was a certain enthusiastic little student there: ‘Even if you die,’ he says, ‘at least you’ll know perfectly well what illness you died of!’ And again that manner they have of sending you to specialists: ‘We only diagnose, you see, but you go to specialist so-and-so, he’ll do the curing.’ The doctor of the old days, who treated every illness, has quite, quite vanished, I tell you, now there are only specialists, and they all advertise in the newspapers. If your nose aches, off you’re sent to Paris: that’s where, they say, a European specialist treats noses. You go to Paris, he examines your nose: ‘I can cure only your right nostril,’ he’ll say, ‘because I don’t treat left nostrils, that’s not my specialty, but after me go to Vienna, there a special specialist will finish curing your left nostril.’ What can you do? I resorted to folk remedies; a certain German doctor advised me to rub myself with honey and salt on the top shelf in the bathhouse. I went, solely in order to go to the baths one more time: I got smeared all over, and not a bit of good. Out of despair I wrote to Count Mattei in Milan; he sent a book and drops, God be with him. And imagine: Hoff’s malt extract helped! I bought it by chance, drank a bottle and a half, and I was fit to dance, it was all gone as if by magic. I firmly resolved to have a ‘thank you’ to him printed in the newspapers, the feeling of gratitude spoke up in me, and imagine, here a different story began: not a single editorial office will accept it! ‘It will be very retrograde,’ they say, ‘no one will believe it, le diable n’existe point (the devil does not exist). Print it anonymously,’ they advise. Well, what kind of ‘thank you’ is it, if it’s anonymous? I laugh with the clerks: ‘It’s believing in God,’ I say, ‘that’s retrograde in our age, but I’m the devil, it’s all right to believe in me.’ ‘We understand,’ they say, ‘who doesn’t believe in the devil, but all the same it can’t be done, it might harm our tendency. Unless as a joke?’ Well, as a joke, I thought, it won’t be witty. So they never printed it. And would you believe it, it even left a mark on my heart. My best feelings, gratitude, for example, are formally forbidden me solely by my social position.”

“Into philosophy again!” Ivan ground out through his teeth with hatred.

“God preserve me, but one can’t help complaining sometimes, can one? I am a slandered man. Here you are, telling me every minute that I’m stupid. One can see at once that you’re a young man. My friend, intelligence is not the only thing! By nature I have a kind and cheerful heart, ‘I, too, you know, have done all sorts of little vaudevilles.’ You seem decidedly to take me for a Khlestakov gone gray,² and yet my fate is far more serious. By some sort of predestination from before time, which I have never been able to make out, I am appointed ‘to deny,’ and yet I am sincerely kind and not at all capable of denial. No, go and deny, without denial, they say, there will be no criticism, and what sort of journal is it without a ‘critical section’? Without criticism there would be nothing but ‘hosanna.’ But for life ‘hosanna’ alone is not enough, that ‘hosanna’ has to pass through the crucible of doubt, and so on, in that vein. I don’t, however, meddle in any of it, I didn’t create it, and I’m not answerable for it. Well, so they chose a scapegoat, made him write in the critical section, and life came of it. We understand this comedy: I, for instance, simply and plainly demand to be annihilated. No, live, they say, because without you there would be nothing. If everything on earth were sensible, nothing would ever happen. Without you there would be no events, and there must be events. And so I serve against my will, so that there may be events, and I do the unreasonable on orders. People take this whole comedy for something serious, even with all their indisputable intelligence. That is their tragedy. Well, and they suffer, of course, but… still, they live for all that, they live really, not fantastically; for suffering is life itself. Without suffering, what pleasure would there be in it? Everything would turn into one endless prayer service: it is holy, but a little dull. Well, and I? I suffer, and still I do not live. I am the x in an indeterminate equation. I am some sort of phantom of life that has lost all ends and beginnings, and has even forgotten at last what to call itself. You’re laughing… no, you’re not laughing, you’re angry again. You’re forever angry, all you want is intelligence, and I will repeat to you again that I would give all this life above the stars, all the ranks and honors, just to become incarnate in the soul of a merchant’s wife weighing seven poods and light candles to God.”

“So even you don’t believe in God?” Ivan grinned with hatred.

“That is, how shall I put it to you, if only you’re serious…”

“Is there a God or not?” Ivan shouted again with savage insistence.

“Ah, so you’re serious? My dear fellow, by God, I don’t know, there, I’ve spoken a great word.”

“You don’t know, and yet you see God? No, you don’t exist on your own, you are I, you are I and nothing more! You are trash, you are my fantasy!”

“That is, if you like, I share your philosophy, that would be fair. Je pense, donc je suis (I think, therefore I am), that I know for certain, but all the rest, everything around me, all these worlds, God, and even Satan himself—all that is not proved for me, whether it exists on its own or is only my emanation, the consistent development of my I, which has existed from before time and alone… in a word, I break off quickly, because I think you’re about to jump up and fight.”

“You’d better tell some anecdote!” Ivan said painfully.

“There is an anecdote, and precisely on our subject, that is, it’s not an anecdote but just a legend. Here you reproach me with unbelief: ‘You see, and yet you don’t believe.’ But, my friend, I am not the only one like that, everyone over on our side has gotten muddled now, and it’s all from your sciences. While there were still atoms, five senses, four elements, well, then everything held together somehow. There were atoms even in the ancient world. But when we learned over there that you had discovered the ‘chemical molecule’ here, and ‘protoplasm,’ and the devil knows what else—then we put our tails between our legs. Simple chaos set in; above all, superstition, gossip; we have just as much gossip as you, you know, even a tiny bit more, and, finally, informing too; we too have a certain section, you know, where certain ‘information’ is received. So, this wild legend, from our Middle Ages—not yours, but ours—and nobody believes it, even among us, except the merchants’ wives of seven poods, that is, again, not your merchants’ wives but ours. Everything you have, we have too, I’m revealing one of our secrets to you out of friendship, though it’s not allowed. The legend, then, is about paradise. Once, you see, there was a certain thinker and philosopher here on your earth, who ‘rejected everything, laws, conscience, faith,’ and, the main thing, the future life. When he died he thought he would go straight into darkness and death, but no: before him was the future life. He was amazed and indignant: ‘This,’ he says, ‘contradicts my convictions.’ So for that he was sentenced… that is, you see, forgive me, I’m only passing on what I heard myself, it’s only a legend… he was sentenced, you see, to walk a quadrillion kilometers in darkness (we’ve gone over to kilometers now, you know), and when he finishes that quadrillion, then the doors of paradise will be opened to him and everything will be forgiven…”

“And what other torments do you have in the other world, besides the quadrillion?” Ivan interrupted with a sort of strange animation.

“What torments? Ah, don’t even ask: in the old days there were all kinds, but nowadays it’s mostly moral ones, ‘pangs of conscience’ and all that nonsense. That came from you too, from ‘the softening of your manners.’ Well, and who gained? Only the unscrupulous gained, because what are pangs of conscience to a man who has no conscience at all? But decent people suffered, those who still had some conscience and honor left… That’s just it, reforms on unprepared soil, and copied from foreign institutions besides—nothing but harm! The good old fire would be better. Well, so this man sentenced to the quadrillion stood there, looked around, and lay down across the road: ‘I won’t go, on principle I won’t go!’ Take the soul of an enlightened Russian atheist, blend it with the soul of the prophet Jonah, who sulked in the belly of the whale for three days and three nights—there you have the character of this thinker who lay down on the road.”

“And what did he lie down on there?”

“Well, there must have been something there to lie on. You’re not laughing?”

“Good man!” Ivan cried, still with the same strange animation. Now he was listening with a sort of unexpected curiosity. “Well, is he still lying there now?”

“That’s just it, he isn’t. He lay there for almost a thousand years, and then he got up and went.”

“What an ass!” Ivan exclaimed, laughing nervously and still seeming to be thinking something over hard. “Isn’t it all the same, whether you lie there forever or walk a quadrillion versts? Why, that’s a billion years of walking!”

“Even much more, only I haven’t a pencil and a scrap of paper, or one could work it out. But he got there long ago, and that is where the anecdote begins.”

“What do you mean, he got there! Where did he get a billion years?”

“But you keep thinking about our present earth! Why, the present earth itself has perhaps repeated itself a billion times; well, it grew old, iced over, cracked, crumbled, broke down into its component elements, again the water that was above the firmament, then again a comet, again a sun, again from the sun an earth—why, this development has perhaps been repeating itself endlessly already, and all in one and the same form, to the last little line. A most indecent bore…”

“Well, well, and what happened when he got there?”

“Why, no sooner had they opened paradise for him and he went in, than, before he had been there even two seconds—and that by the watch, by the watch (though his watch, in my opinion, should long since have broken down into its component elements in his pocket on the way)—before he had been there two seconds, he exclaimed that for those two seconds one could walk not just a quadrillion, but a quadrillion quadrillions, and raised to the quadrillionth power besides! In a word, he sang ‘hosanna,’ and overdid it, so that some there, of a nobler way of thinking, at first didn’t even want to give him their hand: he’d leaped over to the conservatives too precipitately, you see. The Russian nature. I repeat: it’s a legend. I sell it for what I paid for it. So that is the sort of notion still going around among us there about all these subjects.”

“I’ve caught you!” Ivan cried with an almost childlike joy, as though he had at last remembered something for good. “That anecdote about the quadrillion years—I made it up myself! I was seventeen then, I was at the gymnasium… I made up that anecdote then and told it to a schoolmate, his name was Korovkin, it was in Moscow… That anecdote is so distinctive that I couldn’t have got it anywhere else. I had forgotten it… but it came back to me now unconsciously—to me myself, it wasn’t you who told it! The way thousands of things come back unconsciously sometimes, even when a man is being taken to his execution… it came back to me in a dream. And you are that dream! You are a dream and you don’t exist!”

“From the passion with which you deny me,” the gentleman laughed, “I am convinced that you believe in me all the same.”

“Not in the least! I don’t believe a hundredth part!”

“But you believe a thousandth part. Homeopathic doses are perhaps the strongest of all. Admit that you believe, well, a ten-thousandth part…”

“Not for one minute!” Ivan cried furiously. “I would, however, like to believe in you!” he suddenly added strangely.

“Aha! There’s a confession, though! But I’m kind, I’ll help you even here. Listen: it is I who have caught you, not you me! I told you your own anecdote on purpose, which you had already forgotten, so that you would lose your faith in me completely.”

“You’re lying! The aim of your appearance is to convince me that you are.”

“Precisely. But wavering, but anxiety, but the struggle of faith and unbelief—why, that is sometimes such torment for a conscientious man, such as you, that it’s better to hang oneself. Precisely because I know that you believe in me a tiny drop, I have let a dose of unbelief into you, a final one, by telling you that anecdote. I lead you between belief and disbelief by turns, and I have my own aim in this. The new method, sir: for when you have lost your faith in me completely, then you’ll at once start insisting to my face that I’m not a dream but really am, I know you by now; and then I shall have achieved my aim. And my aim is noble. I shall cast only a tiny little seed of faith into you, and out of it an oak will grow—and such an oak that, sitting in that oak, you will want to join ‘the desert fathers and the blameless women’; for deep down you awful, awful much want that, you’ll eat locusts, you’ll drag yourself off into the wilderness to work out your salvation!”

“So you, you scoundrel, are taking pains for the salvation of my soul?”

“One has to do a good deed at least sometimes. How angry you are, how angry, I see!”

“Buffoon! And did you ever tempt the likes of those, the ones who eat locusts and pray for seventeen years in the bare wilderness and are overgrown with moss?”

“My dear fellow, that’s all I ever did. You forget the whole world and all the worlds and cling to one such man, because the diamond is so very precious, you see; one such soul is sometimes worth a whole constellation—we have our own arithmetic, you know. The victory is precious! And some of them, by God, are not beneath you in development, though you won’t believe it: they can contemplate such abysses of faith and unbelief at one and the same moment that, really, it sometimes seems one hair more, and a man will go flying ‘topsy-turvy,’ as the actor Gorbunov says.”

“Well, and what then, did you come away with your nose out of joint?”

“My friend,” the visitor observed sententiously, “it is better, after all, to come away with one’s nose out of joint than sometimes with no nose at all, as a certain ailing marquis (a specialist must have been treating him) declared not long ago at confession to his spiritual father, a Jesuit. I was there—simply delightful. ‘Give me back my nose!’ he says. And he beats his breast. ‘My son,’ the padre dodges, ‘by the inscrutable decrees of providence everything is made good, and a visible misfortune sometimes brings in its train an extraordinary, though invisible, advantage. If stern fate has deprived you of your nose, your advantage lies in this, that no one in all your life will ever dare to tell you that your nose has been put out of joint.’ ‘Holy father, that is no consolation!’ the desperate man exclaims. ‘On the contrary, I would be in raptures to have my nose put out of joint every day of my life, if only it were in its proper place!’ ‘My son,’ the padre sighs, ‘one cannot demand all blessings at once, and this is already murmuring against providence, which even here has not forgotten you; for if you cry out, as you cried out just now, that you would gladly have your nose put out of joint all your life, then even here your wish has already been indirectly fulfilled: for, having lost your nose, you have by that very fact, as it were, had your nose put out of joint all the same…’”

“Pah, how stupid!” Ivan shouted.

“My friend, I only wanted to make you laugh, but, I swear, this is genuine Jesuit casuistry, and, I swear, it all happened letter for letter as I have set it out for you. It was a recent case and caused me a lot of trouble. The unfortunate young man went home and shot himself that same night; I was with him without leaving him to the last moment… As for those Jesuit confessional booths, they are truly my sweetest diversion in the sad moments of life. Here’s another case for you, just the other day. A little blonde comes to an old padre, a little Norman girl, about twenty, a maiden. Beauty, flesh, nature—it makes your mouth water. She bends down and whispers her sin to the padre through the little hole. ‘What is this, my daughter, can it be that you have fallen again already?…’ the padre exclaims. ‘O Sancta Maria, what do I hear: and not with the same one. But how long is this going to go on, and how is it you are not ashamed!’ ‘Ah, mon père,’ answers the sinner, all in penitent tears, ‘ça lui fait tant de plaisir et à moi si peu de peine!’ (Ah, Father, it gives him so much pleasure and costs me so little pain!) Well, imagine such an answer! At this point even I backed off: it is the cry of nature itself, it is, if you like, better than innocence itself! I absolved her of her sin then and there and turned to go, but at once I was obliged to come back: I hear the padre through the little hole making an assignation with her for the evening, and he’s an old man, a flint, and there he fell in a single instant! Nature, the truth of nature, had its way! What, turning up your nose again, angry again? I really don’t know how to please you…”

“Leave me alone, you’re pounding in my brain like a nightmare I can’t shake off,” Ivan moaned painfully, helpless before his apparition. “I’m bored with you, unbearably and tormentingly! I would give a great deal to be able to drive you away!”

“I repeat, moderate your demands, don’t demand of me ‘everything great and beautiful,’ and you will see how well we get along together,” the gentleman said impressively. “Truly, you are angry with me because I did not appear to you in some sort of red glow, ‘thundering and blazing,’ with scorched wings, but presented myself in such a modest form. You are offended, in the first place, in your aesthetic feelings, and in the second place, in your pride: how, you think, could such a vulgar devil come in to such a great man? No, there is that romantic streak in you after all, the one that Belinsky ridiculed so long ago. There’s nothing to be done, young man. I was thinking this evening, as I was getting ready to come to you, of appearing as a joke in the form of a retired actual state councilor who had served in the Caucasus, with the star of the Lion and the Sun on his tailcoat, but I was decidedly afraid, because you would have given me a beating just for daring to pin the Lion and the Sun on my tailcoat instead of at least the Polar Star or Sirius. And you keep on about my being stupid. But my God, I make no claim to equal you in intelligence. Mephistopheles, appearing to Faust, testified of himself that he wills evil but does only good. Well, that’s as he pleases, but I am quite the opposite. I am perhaps the only being in all of nature who loves the truth and sincerely desires good. I was there when the Word, who had died on the cross, was ascending into heaven, bearing on his bosom the soul of the thief crucified at his right hand, I heard the joyful shrieks of the cherubim, singing and crying out ‘Hosanna,’ and the thundering cry of rapture of the seraphim, which made heaven and the whole universe shake. And, I swear by all that is holy, I wanted to join the choir and shout ‘Hosanna!’ with all the rest. It was already escaping, already bursting from my breast… I am, you know, very sensitive and artistically impressionable. But common sense—oh, the most unfortunate quality of my nature—kept me within due bounds even then, and I let the moment pass! For what, I thought at that same moment, what would have come of it after my ‘hosanna’? Everything in the world would have been extinguished at once, and no events of any kind would have happened anymore. And so, solely out of the duty of my office and my social position, I was obliged to stifle the good moment in myself and stay with my dirty tricks. Someone takes all the honor of the good for himself, and only dirty tricks are left to me as my lot. But I don’t envy the honor of living as a sponger, I am not ambitious. Why, of all beings in the world, am I alone condemned to the curses of all decent people and even to kicks from their boots, since, when I become incarnate, I must sometimes take even such consequences? I know, you see, there is a secret in it, but they won’t reveal the secret to me for anything, because then, perhaps, guessing what it’s all about, I would roar out ‘hosanna,’ and the necessary minus would instantly vanish, and good sense would set in all over the world, and with it, of course, the end of everything, even of the newspapers and journals, because who would subscribe to them then? I know, you see, that in the end I’ll make my peace, I too will walk my quadrillion through to the end and find out the secret. But until that happens, I sulk and, against my will, fulfill my appointed task: to destroy thousands so that one may be saved. How many souls, for example, had to be destroyed and how many honest reputations disgraced in order to get just one righteous Job, over whom they caught me out so wickedly in days of old! No, as long as the secret is not revealed, two truths exist for me: one theirs, over there, still quite unknown to me, and the other mine. And it is not yet known which will turn out the cleaner… Have you fallen asleep?”

“Small wonder,” Ivan moaned spitefully. “Everything stupid in my nature, long since outlived, ground up in my mind, thrown away like carrion—you serve it up to me as if it were some sort of news!”

“Missed the mark again! And I thought I would even charm you with my literary style: that ‘hosanna’ in heaven really didn’t come out badly, did it? And then just now that sarcastic tone à la Heine, eh, isn’t it so?”

“No, I was never such a lackey! How could my soul have begotten such a lackey as you?”

“My friend, I know a most charming and delightful young Russian lordling: a young thinker, a great lover of literature and of elegant things, the author of a poem of great promise, entitled ‘The Grand Inquisitor’… It was only him I had in mind!”

“I forbid you to speak of ‘The Grand Inquisitor,’” Ivan exclaimed, flushing all over with shame.

“Well, and what about ‘The Geological Upheaval’? Do you remember? Now that was a little poem!”

“Be quiet, or I’ll kill you!”

“Kill me, will you? No, excuse me, I shall have my say. I came on purpose to regale myself with that pleasure. Oh, how I love the dreams of my fervent young friends, trembling with the thirst for life! ‘There are new people there,’ you decided last spring, when you were getting ready to come here, ‘they propose to destroy everything and begin with anthropophagy. Fools, they didn’t ask me! In my opinion, there is no need to destroy anything, all that needs to be destroyed is the idea of God in mankind, that is where the work must start! It is with this, with this that one must begin—oh, blind men, who understand nothing! Once mankind, to a man, renounces God (and I believe that this period, parallel to the geological periods, will come to pass), then of itself, without anthropophagy, the whole former worldview will fall, and above all, the whole former morality, and everything will be new. Men will unite in order to take from life everything it can give, but only for happiness and joy in this world alone. Man will be exalted with the spirit of divine, titanic pride, and the man-god will appear. Conquering nature hourly, now without limits, by his will and by science, man will thereby hourly feel a delight so lofty that it will replace for him all his former hopes of heavenly delights. Everyone will know that he is mortal, wholly, without resurrection, and will accept death proudly and calmly, like a god. Out of pride he will understand that he has no reason to murmur because life is a moment, and he will love his brother now without any reward. Love will satisfy only a moment of life, but the very awareness of its momentariness will intensify its fire as much as it was once dissipated in hopes of a love beyond the grave and without end’… and so on and so forth in the same vein. Most charming!”

Ivan was sitting with his hands pressed over his ears and looking at the floor, but he had begun to tremble all over. The voice went on:

“The question now, my young thinker thought, is this: is it possible for such a period ever to come, or not? If it comes, then everything is settled, and mankind will be arranged once and for all. But since, in view of man’s inveterate stupidity, this will perhaps not be arranged even in a thousand years, everyone who already knows the truth even now is allowed to arrange things for himself exactly as he pleases, on the new principles. In this sense ‘everything is permitted’ to him. More than that: even if this period never comes, still, since there is no God and no immortality anyway, the new man is allowed to become a man-god, even if he is the only one in the whole world, and of course, in his new rank, to leap with a light heart over every former moral barrier of the former slave-man, if need be. For God there is no law! Where God stands, there is the place of God! Where I stand, there at once will be the first place… ‘everything is permitted,’ and that’s that! All this is very charming; only if one wants to cheat, why, one would think, does one also need the sanction of truth? But such is our modern little Russian man: without a sanction he won’t even dare to cheat, so much has he come to love the truth…”

The visitor was talking, evidently carried away by his own eloquence, raising his voice more and more and glancing mockingly at his host; but he did not manage to finish: Ivan suddenly seized a glass from the table and flung it at the orator with all his strength.

“Ah, mais c’est bête enfin! (Oh, but that’s really stupid!)” the other exclaimed, jumping up from the sofa and brushing the splashes of tea off himself with his fingers. “He remembered Luther’s inkwell! He himself takes me for a dream and throws glasses at a dream! That’s womanish! And I suspected as much, that you were only pretending to stop up your ears, and you were listening…”

Suddenly a firm and insistent knocking came at the window frame from the yard. Ivan Fyodorovich jumped up from the sofa.

“Do you hear, you’d better open,” cried the visitor, “that’s your brother Alyosha with the most unexpected and curious news, I give you my word!”

“Be quiet, you deceiver, I knew it was Alyosha before you did, I had a premonition of him, and of course he hasn’t come for nothing, of course it’s with ‘news’!…” Ivan exclaimed in a frenzy.

“Open, then, open up for him. There’s a blizzard outside, and he’s your brother. Monsieur, sait-il le temps qu’il fait? C’est à ne pas mettre un chien dehors… (Does monsieur know what the weather is like? It’s not fit to put a dog out in…)”

The knocking went on. Ivan wanted to rush to the window; but something seemed suddenly to bind his legs and arms. He strained with all his might, as if to break his bonds, but in vain. The knocking at the window grew stronger and louder. At last the bonds suddenly broke, and Ivan Fyodorovich jumped up on the sofa. He looked around wildly. Both candles had almost burned down, the glass he had just hurled at his visitor was standing on the table in front of him, and on the sofa opposite there was no one. The knocking at the window frame, though it went on insistently, was not nearly as loud as it had just seemed to him in his dream; on the contrary, it was very restrained.

“It was not a dream! No, I swear, it was not a dream, it all happened just now!” cried Ivan Fyodorovich, and he rushed to the window and opened the vent pane.

“Alyosha, I told you not to come!” he shouted savagely to his brother. “In two words: what is it you want? In two words, you hear?”

“An hour ago Smerdyakov hanged himself,” Alyosha answered from the yard.

“Go round to the porch, I’ll open for you right away,” said Ivan, and he went to open the door for Alyosha.

Notes

1. 1. A play on Terence’s line Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, “I am a man, and I count nothing human alien to me”; the devil puts Satana (Satan) in place of Homo (man).

2. 2. Khlestakov, the empty braggart of Gogol’s comedy The Inspector General, who boasts that he too has written “all sorts of little vaudevilles,” the words the devil has just quoted.