Dostoevsky (192 page)

On the surface, Ivan refuses to accept “the myth about that crazy idiot, the epileptic Smerdyakov” (15: 39) having committed the murder. Nonetheless, Alyosha possesses Zosima’s intuitive gift of moral-psychological penetration, and realizes that Ivan has been brooding these last two months over his own possible responsibility. When Ivan calls Dimitry a “murderer” and a “monster,” Alyosha objects; and when challenged to name someone else, he replies: “I know only one thing . . . 
it wasn’t you
who killed father.” Ivan is so taken aback by this reply touching on all his own hidden fears that he thinks Alyosha must know of his hallucinatory conversations with the devil on the same subject (15: 40). The haughty Ivan suddenly decides to visit Smerdyakov—not for the first but for the third time, the two earlier encounters having already led to the demented condition in which we find him.

A violent snowstorm begins as Ivan makes his way through the unlit streets on his way to Smerdyakov’s cottage, and he stumbles into a drunken peasant singing the first two lines of a popular ditty: “Ach, Vanka’s gone to Petersburg / I won’t wait till he comes back.” This song recalls to Ivan his own departure for Moscow, and what had occurred before
he
returned; and although such a connection is not made explicitly, no doubt this is why “Ivan felt an intense hatred for [the peasant]” (15: 57). When the peasant lurches against him, Ivan knocks him down and leaves him lying in the snow, although the thought crosses his mind that the peasant will freeze to death.

Smerdyakov had become ill again, and each immediately remarks on how sickly the other looks; both are being undermined by the same moral-psychic anguish. Smerdyakov, however, now has the upper hand. As he has come to understand, Ivan is fearful that his implicit consent to the crime would be exposed. Disgusted by Ivan’s unwillingness to face the truth, Smerdyakov admits his own guilt while refusing to assume it alone. “You murdered him,” he tells Ivan, “you are the real murderer. I was only your instrument, your faithful servant . . . and it was following your words that I did it” (15: 57). Under Ivan’s persistent questioning—he is avid to learn all the details—Smerdyakov explains how the crime had been committed just after Dimitry had struck Grigory and leaped over the fence, fleeing his father’s house.

There is an aspect of this dialogue that should not be overlooked. Just after Smerdyakov has made his confession and his interlocutor has “shuddered all over with a cold shiver,” Ivan mutters that “I’m afraid you’re a dream, a phantom sitting there before me.” Smerdyakov replies that there “are only us two and one other,” immediately adding: “No doubt that he is here, that third, between us.” This reference to “a third” terrifies Ivan, who takes it as a mention of the devil and looks around, with “his eyes hastily searching for someone in all the corners.” Smerydakov, however, explains “that this third one is God, sir, Providence itself, sir, it’s right here with us now, sir, only don’t look for it, you won’t find it” (15: 60). While the devil has been appearing to Ivan’s tormented and demented consciousness, Smerdyakov apparently has been returning to the sources of his own faith since losing his respect for Ivan’s ideas. That he has been seeking moral comfort in such a return is indicated by a small detail: he covers the money he obtained from the murder, and which he now displays to Ivan, with a copy of
The Sayings of the Holy Father Isaac the Syrian
, a collection of popular religious texts by a sixth-century ascetic. Father Isaac has replaced the French grammar Smerdyakov had been studying at the time of the second visit, and we may recall that, even at the height of his fascination with Ivan and his ideas, this offspring of stinking Lizaveta had still readily accepted the existence of the two or three hermits in the desert who could move mountains.

Smerdyakov is filled with contempt for Ivan’s dismay at the recognition of his own share of guilt, and his struggle to diminish it as much as possible. “ ‘God sees,’ Ivan raised his hand, ‘perhaps I, too, was guilty, perhaps I really had a secret desire for my father’s . . . death, but I swear I was not as guilty as you think and I didn’t urge you on at all.’ ” Nonetheless, he assures Smerdyakov that he will disclose the truth at the trial the next day, including his own share of responsibility; but Smerydakov refuses to believe that he will have the courage to perform what would, in any case, be only a futile gesture. Smerdyakov would simply deny Ivan’s testimony and argue that he was trying to save his brother. Most wounding of all, he taunts Ivan with the inconsistency between his sentiments and his ideas: “You used to say yourself that everything is lawful, so now why are you so upset, too?” (15: 66–67). Smerdyakov, however, is caught in a similar inner conflict: denying that he again believes in God, he no longer has any faith in what had replaced God for him, namely, Ivan’s ideas. His peasant conscience has made him ill, just as Ivan’s educated sense of guilt has been undermining
him
, and the suicide of Smerdyakov will coincide exactly with Ivan’s mental breakdown in the next chapter.

The scene ends with Ivan, as he walks out into the snowstorm, firmly deciding to meet Smerdyakov’s challenge. Stumbling against the inert body of the peasant, Ivan now brings him to a police station, arranges for a doctor, and saves his life. This is the first effect of his new resoluteness, which overcomes all the contempt for erring and sinful humankind that he had previously exhibited, and which perhaps foreshadows his role in the envisaged second volume. Although he is now capable of such a spontaneous gesture of personal human solidarity, it is a different matter when he thinks of going to the prosecutor at once to denounce Smerdyakov as the murderer and reveal his own share of the responsibility.

Choosing to put off this ordeal until morning, his determination to act decisively thus wavers; once again he is caught in the toils of his moral-psychological dilemma—the dilemma of intending to follow the dictates of a conscience whose precepts his reason cannot justify. Entering his room and, trying to keep from falling asleep, he “got up uneasily and walked across the room to shake off his drowsiness” (15: 66–67). This last phrase, conveying Ivan’s own awareness, turns out to be entirely illusory; he is now in fact asleep and only dreaming that he walked across the room. “I have dreams now,” Ivan tells Alyosha in the next chapter, “yet they are no dreams but reality. I walk about, talk, and see” (15: 86). Ivan has become incapable of distinguishing between his dreams and the objective world; and when he looks uneasily at a sofa in his room, he observes someone sitting there “who had not been in the room when Ivan Feodorovich came into it” (15: 70).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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