The Brothers Karamazov
have none? But decent people who have conscience and a sense of honor
suffer for it. Reforms, when the ground has not been prepared for them,
especially if they are institutions copied from abroad, do nothing but
mischief! The ancient fire was better. Well, this man, who was
condemned to the quadrillion kilometers, stood still, looked round and
lay down across the road. ‘I won’t go, I refuse on principle!’ Take the
soul of an enlightened Russian atheist and mix it with the soul of the
prophet Jonah, who sulked for three days and nights in the belly of the
whale, and you get the character of that thinker who lay across the
road.”
“What did he lie on there?”
“Well, I suppose there was something to lie on. You are not laughing?”
“Bravo!” cried Ivan, still with the same strange eagerness. Now he was
listening with an unexpected curiosity. “Well, is he lying there now?”
“That’s the point, that he isn’t. He lay there almost a thousand years
and then he got up and went on.”
“What an ass!” cried Ivan, laughing nervously and still seeming to be
pondering something intently. “Does it make any difference whether he
lies there for ever or walks the quadrillion kilometers? It would take
a billion years to walk it?”
“Much more than that. I haven’t got a pencil and paper or I could work
it out. But he got there long ago, and that’s where the story begins.”
“What, he got there? But how did he get the billion years to do it?”
“Why, you keep thinking of our present earth! But our present earth may
have been repeated a billion times. Why, it’s become extinct, been
frozen; cracked, broken to bits, disintegrated into its elements, again
‘the water above the firmament,’ then again a comet, again a sun, again
from the sun it becomes earth—and the same sequence may have been
repeated endlessly and exactly the same to every detail, most unseemly
and insufferably tedious—”
“Well, well, what happened when he arrived?”
“Why, the moment the gates of Paradise were open and he walked in,
before he had been there two seconds, by his watch (though to my
thinking his watch must have long dissolved into its elements on the
way), 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 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. The Russian
temperament. I repeat, it’s a legend. I give it for what it’s worth. So
that’s the sort of ideas we have on such subjects even now.”
“I’ve caught you!” Ivan cried, with an almost childish delight, as
though he had succeeded in remembering something at last. “That
anecdote about the quadrillion years, I made up myself! I was seventeen
then, I was at the high school. I made up that anecdote and told it to
a schoolfellow called Korovkin, it was at Moscow.... The anecdote is so
characteristic that I couldn’t have taken it from anywhere. I thought
I’d forgotten it ... but I’ve unconsciously recalled it—I recalled it
myself—it was not you telling it! Thousands of things are unconsciously
remembered like that even when people are being taken to execution ...
it’s come back to me in a dream. You are that dream! You are a dream,
not a living creature!”
“From the vehemence with which you deny my existence,” laughed the
gentleman, “I am convinced that you believe in me.”
“Not in the slightest! I haven’t a hundredth part of a grain of faith
in you!”
“But you have the thousandth of a grain. Homeopathic doses perhaps are
the strongest. Confess that you have faith even to the ten-thousandth
of a grain.”
“Not for one minute,” cried Ivan furiously. “But I should like to
believe in you,” he added strangely.
“Aha! There’s an admission! But I am good-natured. I’ll come to your
assistance again. Listen, it was I caught you, not you me. I told you
your anecdote you’d forgotten, on purpose, so as to destroy your faith
in me completely.”
“You are lying. The object of your visit is to convince me of your
existence!”
“Just so. But hesitation, suspense, conflict between belief and
disbelief—is sometimes such torture to a conscientious man, such as you
are, that it’s better to hang oneself at once. Knowing that you are
inclined to believe in me, I administered some disbelief by telling you
that anecdote. I lead you to belief and disbelief by turns, and I have
my motive in it. It’s the new method. As soon as you disbelieve in me
completely, you’ll begin assuring me to my face that I am not a dream
but a reality. I know you. Then I shall have attained my object, which
is an honorable one. I shall sow in you 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 long to enter the ranks of ‘the hermits in the wilderness and
the saintly women,’ for that is what you are secretly longing for.
You’ll dine on locusts, you’ll wander into the wilderness to save your
soul!”
“Then it’s for the salvation of my soul you are working, is it, you
scoundrel?”
“One must do a good work sometimes. How ill-humored you are!”
“Fool! did you ever tempt those holy men who ate locusts and prayed
seventeen years in the wilderness till they were overgrown with moss?”
“My dear fellow, I’ve done nothing else. One forgets the whole world
and all the worlds, and sticks to one such saint, because he is a very
precious diamond. One such soul, you know, is sometimes worth a whole
constellation. We have our system of reckoning, you know. The conquest
is priceless! And some of them, on my word, are not inferior to you in
culture, though you won’t believe it. They can contemplate such depths
of belief and disbelief at the same moment that sometimes it really
seems that they are within a hair’s-breadth of being ‘turned upside
down,’ as the actor Gorbunov says.”
“Well, did you get your nose pulled?”[8]
“My dear fellow,” observed the visitor sententiously, “it’s better to
get off with your nose pulled than without a nose at all. As an
afflicted marquis observed not long ago (he must have been treated by a
specialist) in confession to his spiritual father—a Jesuit. I was
present, it was simply charming. ‘Give me back my nose!’ he said, and
he beat his breast. ‘My son,’ said the priest evasively, ‘all things
are accomplished in accordance with the inscrutable decrees of
Providence, and what seems a misfortune sometimes leads to
extraordinary, though unapparent, benefits. If stern destiny has
deprived you of your nose, it’s to your advantage that no one can ever
pull you by your nose.’ ‘Holy father, that’s no comfort,’ cried the
despairing marquis. ‘I’d be delighted to have my nose pulled every day
of my life, if it were only in its proper place.’ ‘My son,’ sighs the
priest, ‘you can’t expect every blessing at once. This is murmuring
against Providence, who even in this has not forgotten you, for if you
repine as you repined just now, declaring you’d be glad to have your
nose pulled for the rest of your life, your desire has already been
fulfilled indirectly, for when you lost your nose, you were led by the
nose.’”
“Fool, how stupid!” cried Ivan.
“My dear friend, I only wanted to amuse you. But I swear that’s the
genuine Jesuit casuistry and I swear that it all happened word for word
as I’ve told you. It happened lately and gave me a great deal of
trouble. The unhappy young man shot himself that very night when he got
home. I was by his side till the very last moment. Those Jesuit
confessionals are really my most delightful diversion at melancholy
moments. Here’s another incident that happened only the other day. A
little blonde Norman girl of twenty—a buxom, unsophisticated beauty
that would make your mouth water—comes to an old priest. She bends down
and whispers her sin into the grating. ‘Why, my daughter, have you
fallen again already?’ cries the priest. ‘O Sancta Maria, what do I
hear! Not the same man this time, how long is this going on? Aren’t you
ashamed!’ ‘_Ah, mon père_,’ answers the sinner with tears of penitence,
‘_ça lui fait tant de plaisir, et à moi si peu de peine!_’ Fancy, such
an answer! I drew back. It was the cry of nature, better than innocence
itself, if you like. I absolved her sin on the spot and was turning to
go, but I was forced to turn back. I heard the priest at the grating
making an appointment with her for the evening—though he was an old man
hard as flint, he fell in an instant! It was nature, the truth of
nature asserted its rights! What, you are turning up your nose again?
Angry again? I don’t know how to please you—”
“Leave me alone, you are beating on my brain like a haunting
nightmare,” Ivan moaned miserably, helpless before his apparition. “I
am bored with you, agonizingly and insufferably. I would give anything
to be able to shake you off!”
“I repeat, moderate your expectations, don’t demand of me ‘everything
great and noble’ and you’ll see how well we shall get on,” said the
gentleman impressively. “You are really angry with me for not having
appeared to you in a red glow, with thunder and lightning, with
scorched wings, but have shown myself in such a modest form. You are
wounded, in the first place, in your esthetic feelings, and, secondly,
in your pride. How could such a vulgar devil visit such a great man as
you! Yes, there is that romantic strain in you, that was so derided by
Byelinsky. I can’t help it, young man, as I got ready to come to you I
did think as a joke of appearing in the figure of a retired general who
had served in the Caucasus, with a star of the Lion and the Sun on my
coat. But I was positively afraid of doing it, for you’d have thrashed
me for daring to pin the Lion and the Sun on my coat, instead of, at
least, the Polar Star or the Sirius. And you keep on saying I am
stupid, but, mercy on us! I make no claim to be equal to you in
intelligence. Mephistopheles declared to Faust that he desired evil,
but did only good. Well, he can say what he likes, it’s quite the
opposite with me. I am perhaps the one man in all creation who loves
the truth and genuinely desires good. I was there when the Word, Who
died on the Cross, rose up into heaven bearing on His bosom the soul of
the penitent thief. I heard the glad shrieks of the cherubim singing
and shouting hosannah and the thunderous rapture of the seraphim which
shook heaven and all creation, and I swear to you by all that’s sacred,
I longed to join the choir and shout hosannah with them all. The word
had almost escaped me, had almost broken from my lips ... you know how
susceptible and esthetically impressionable I am. But common sense—oh,
a most unhappy trait in my character—kept me in due bounds and I let
the moment pass! For what would have happened, I reflected, what would
have happened after my hosannah? Everything on earth would have been
extinguished at once and no events could have occurred. And so, solely
from a sense of duty and my social position, I was forced to suppress
the good moment and to stick to my nasty task. Somebody takes all the
credit of what’s good for Himself, and nothing but nastiness is left
for me. But I don’t envy the honor of a life of idle imposture, I am
not ambitious. Why am I, of all creatures in the world, doomed to be
cursed by all decent people and even to be kicked, for if I put on
mortal form I am bound to take such consequences sometimes? I know, of
course, there’s a secret in it, but they won’t tell me the secret for
anything, for then perhaps, seeing the meaning of it, I might bawl
hosannah, and the indispensable minus would disappear at once, and good
sense would reign supreme throughout the whole world. And that, of