The Brothers Karamazov
lives in pomp, and domineers over his poor neighbors as though they
were dependents and buffoons. He has kennels of hundreds of hounds and
nearly a hundred dog-boys—all mounted, and in uniform. One day a
serf-boy, a little child of eight, threw a stone in play and hurt the
paw of the general’s favorite hound. ‘Why is my favorite dog lame?’ He
is told that the boy threw a stone that hurt the dog’s paw. ‘So you did
it.’ The general looked the child up and down. ‘Take him.’ He was
taken—taken from his mother and kept shut up all night. Early that
morning the general comes out on horseback, with the hounds, his
dependents, dog-boys, and huntsmen, all mounted around him in full
hunting parade. The servants are summoned for their edification, and in
front of them all stands the mother of the child. The child is brought
from the lock-up. It’s a gloomy, cold, foggy autumn day, a capital day
for hunting. The general orders the child to be undressed; the child is
stripped naked. He shivers, numb with terror, not daring to cry....
‘Make him run,’ commands the general. ‘Run! run!’ shout the dog-boys.
The boy runs.... ‘At him!’ yells the general, and he sets the whole
pack of hounds on the child. The hounds catch him, and tear him to
pieces before his mother’s eyes!... I believe the general was
afterwards declared incapable of administering his estates. Well—what
did he deserve? To be shot? To be shot for the satisfaction of our
moral feelings? Speak, Alyosha!”
“To be shot,” murmured Alyosha, lifting his eyes to Ivan with a pale,
twisted smile.
“Bravo!” cried Ivan, delighted. “If even you say so.... You’re a pretty
monk! So there is a little devil sitting in your heart, Alyosha
Karamazov!”
“What I said was absurd, but—”
“That’s just the point, that ‘but’!” cried Ivan. “Let me tell you,
novice, that the absurd is only too necessary on earth. The world
stands on absurdities, and perhaps nothing would have come to pass in
it without them. We know what we know!”
“What do you know?”
“I understand nothing,” Ivan went on, as though in delirium. “I don’t
want to understand anything now. I want to stick to the fact. I made up
my mind long ago not to understand. If I try to understand anything, I
shall be false to the fact, and I have determined to stick to the
fact.”
“Why are you trying me?” Alyosha cried, with sudden distress. “Will you
say what you mean at last?”
“Of course, I will; that’s what I’ve been leading up to. You are dear
to me, I don’t want to let you go, and I won’t give you up to your
Zossima.”
Ivan for a minute was silent, his face became all at once very sad.
“Listen! I took the case of children only to make my case clearer. Of
the other tears of humanity with which the earth is soaked from its
crust to its center, I will say nothing. I have narrowed my subject on
purpose. I am a bug, and I recognize in all humility that I cannot
understand why the world is arranged as it is. Men are themselves to
blame, I suppose; they were given paradise, they wanted freedom, and
stole fire from heaven, though they knew they would become unhappy, so
there is no need to pity them. With my pitiful, earthly, Euclidian
understanding, all I know is that there is suffering and that there are
none guilty; that cause follows effect, simply and directly; that
everything flows and finds its level—but that’s only Euclidian
nonsense, I know that, and I can’t consent to live by it! What comfort
is it to me that there are none guilty and that cause follows effect
simply and directly, and that I know it?—I must have justice, or I will
destroy myself. And not justice in some remote infinite time and space,
but here on earth, and that I could see myself. I have believed in it.
I want to see it, and if I am dead by then, let me rise again, for if
it all happens without me, it will be too unfair. Surely I haven’t
suffered, simply that I, my crimes and my sufferings, may manure the
soil of the future harmony for somebody else. I want to see with my own
eyes the hind lie down with the lion and the victim rise up and embrace
his murderer. I want to be there when every one suddenly understands
what it has all been for. All the religions of the world are built on
this longing, and I am a believer. But then there are the children, and
what am I to do about them? That’s a question I can’t answer. For the
hundredth time I repeat, there are numbers of questions, but I’ve only
taken the children, because in their case what I mean is so
unanswerably clear. Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal
harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me, please? It’s beyond
all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for
the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil
for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among
men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no
such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must
share responsibility for all their fathers’ crimes, such a truth is not
of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say,
perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you
see he didn’t grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight
years old. Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course,
what an upheaval of the universe it will be, when everything in heaven
and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and
has lived cries aloud: ‘Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are
revealed.’ When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to
the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’
then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be
made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can’t accept that
harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures.
You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that
moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with
the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child’s torturer, ‘Thou
art just, O Lord!’ but I don’t want to cry aloud then. While there is
still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher
harmony altogether. It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child
who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its
stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to ‘dear, kind God’! It’s
not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned
for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone
for them? Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care
for avenging them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good
can hell do, since those children have already been tortured? And what
becomes of harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive. I want to
embrace. I don’t want more suffering. And if the sufferings of children
go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth,
then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. I don’t want
the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She
dare not forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she will, let
her forgive the torturer for the immeasurable suffering of her mother’s
heart. But the sufferings of her tortured child she has no right to
forgive; she dare not forgive the torturer, even if the child were to
forgive him! And if that is so, if they dare not forgive, what becomes
of harmony? Is there in the whole world a being who would have the
right to forgive and could forgive? I don’t want harmony. From love for
humanity I don’t want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged
suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and
unsatisfied indignation, _even if I were wrong_. Besides, too high a
price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay so much to
enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I
am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And
that I am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most
respectfully return Him the ticket.”
“That’s rebellion,” murmured Alyosha, looking down.
“Rebellion? I am sorry you call it that,” said Ivan earnestly. “One can
hardly live in rebellion, and I want to live. Tell me yourself, I
challenge you—answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human
destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them
peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to
torture to death only one tiny creature—that baby beating its breast
with its fist, for instance—and to found that edifice on its unavenged
tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell
me, and tell the truth.”
“No, I wouldn’t consent,” said Alyosha softly.
“And can you admit the idea that men for whom you are building it would
agree to accept their happiness on the foundation of the unexpiated
blood of a little victim? And accepting it would remain happy for
ever?”
“No, I can’t admit it. Brother,” said Alyosha suddenly, with flashing
eyes, “you said just now, is there a being in the whole world who would
have the right to forgive and could forgive? But there is a Being and
He can forgive everything, all and for all, because He gave His
innocent blood for all and everything. You have forgotten Him, and on
Him is built the edifice, and it is to Him they cry aloud, ‘Thou art
just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed!’”
“Ah! the One without sin and His blood! No, I have not forgotten Him;
on the contrary I’ve been wondering all the time how it was you did not
bring Him in before, for usually all arguments on your side put Him in
the foreground. Do you know, Alyosha—don’t laugh! I made a poem about a
year ago. If you can waste another ten minutes on me, I’ll tell it to
you.”
“You wrote a poem?”
“Oh, no, I didn’t write it,” laughed Ivan, “and I’ve never written two
lines of poetry in my life. But I made up this poem in prose and I
remembered it. I was carried away when I made it up. You will be my
first reader—that is listener. Why should an author forego even one
listener?” smiled Ivan. “Shall I tell it to you?”
“I am all attention,” said Alyosha.
“My poem is called ‘The Grand Inquisitor’; it’s a ridiculous thing, but
I want to tell it to you.”
Chapter V.
The Grand Inquisitor
“Even this must have a preface—that is, a literary preface,” laughed
Ivan, “and I am a poor hand at making one. You see, my action takes
place in the sixteenth century, and at that time, as you probably
learnt at school, it was customary in poetry to bring down heavenly
powers on earth. Not to speak of Dante, in France, clerks, as well as
the monks in the monasteries, used to give regular performances in
which the Madonna, the saints, the angels, Christ, and God himself were
brought on the stage. In those days it was done in all simplicity. In
Victor Hugo’s _Notre Dame de Paris_ an edifying and gratuitous
spectacle was provided for the people in the Hôtel de Ville of Paris in
the reign of Louis XI. in honor of the birth of the dauphin. It was
called _Le bon jugement de la très sainte et gracieuse Vierge Marie_,
and she appears herself on the stage and pronounces her _bon jugement_.
Similar plays, chiefly from the Old Testament, were occasionally
performed in Moscow too, up to the times of Peter the Great. But
besides plays there were all sorts of legends and ballads scattered
about the world, in which the saints and angels and all the powers of
Heaven took part when required. In our monasteries the monks busied
themselves in translating, copying, and even composing such poems—and
even under the Tatars. There is, for instance, one such poem (of