The Brothers Karamazov (44 page)

“I think that if the devil doesn’t exist and is therefore man’s creation, man has made him in his own image.”

“Just as he has created God, in that case.”

“Oh, you’re really very good at ‘cracking the wind of the poor phrase,’ as Polonius says in 
Hamlet
,” Ivan said, laughing. “You caught me up on my ‘poor phrase.’ Good, I’m glad you did. But I don’t think much of your God, if man has created Him in his image. You asked me a few seconds ago why I was telling you all this. Well, it’s because I’m a collector of certain little facts; I even write them down. I collect them from news items, from stories people tell me, wherever I happen to find them, and I already have quite a respectable collection. These Turks, of course, are part of my collection, but they’re just foreigners. I have quite a few home-grown facts that are even better than the Turkish ones. You know, we go in more for beating, flogging, whipping—that’s more to our national taste. To us, nailing people by their ears is unthinkable because, despite everything, we 
are
 Europeans. But birch and lash, they’re different—they’re something that’s really ours and cannot be taken away from us. I hear that they have stopped flogging in Europe altogether, whether because their habits have become milder or because they’ve passed new laws forbidding it, so that a man no longer dares to beat another, I don’t know. What I do know is that they have made up for it with something else, something that is as native to them as flogging is to us. Indeed, it is so peculiar to those countries that it seems impossible here, although actually it is spreading in Russia too, along with a certain religious movement prevalent among our upper classes.

“I have a charming little pamphlet translated from French. It’s about the execution in Geneva, not more than five years ago, of a twenty-three-year-old convicted murderer called Richard. The man repented and was converted to the Christian faith just before the execution. He was an illegitimate child and when he was only six years old his parents gave him as a present to some shepherds in the Swiss mountains, who took him to make him work for them. He grew up among them like a little wild animal. They taught him nothing. When he was only seven, they sent him out in the cold and rain to take the cattle to graze, without giving him any warm clothes and without even feeding him properly. And it goes without saying that they never questioned their right to treat him like that or felt guilty about it, because, after all, Richard had been given them as a present, like an inanimate object, and they didn’t imagine they could have any obligations even to feed him. In his testimony, Richard himself recounted that during those years he was like the prodigal son, longing to eat the slops given to the pigs to fatten them up for market, but even that was not for him and he was beaten whenever they caught him stealing the pigs’ feed. And so passed his whole childhood and his early youth, until he became big and strong enough to go out and steal on his own. The young savage would go to Geneva, hire himself out as a day laborer, and then drink the money he earned. He lived like a brute and ended up by robbing and killing some old man. He was caught, tried, and sentenced to death. They’re not exactly sentimental over there. But once in prison, he was immediately surrounded by pastors of various Christian sects, lady philanthropists, and such people. In prison they taught him to read and write, explained the Gospels to him, preached to him, exhorted him, worked on him, nagged him, put pressure on him, until at last he himself solemnly admitted his crime. He was converted and wrote to the court that he had been a monster but that finally God had made him see the light and had granted him grace. Everyone in town was greatly moved, all of philanthropic and pious Geneva was tremendously excited. All the well-bred, important people of the city hurried to the prison to embrace and kiss Richard, exclaiming, ‘You are our brother, grace has descended upon you!’ to which Richard, himself in tears, answered, ‘Yes, grace has descended upon me! When I was a small child and a youth, I was glad when I got pigs’ feed, whereas now grace has descended upon me and I’m dying in the Lord!’ ‘Yes, yes, Richard,’ they said, ‘die in the Lord. You have shed blood and must die in the Lord. Although it was through no fault of your own that you knew nothing about the Lord when you were a small boy and, envying the pigs their feed, you stole some of it, for which you were beaten, because stealing is very wicked, now you have shed blood and must die.’ And so Richard’s last day arrived. In his weak, emotional state, Richard kept tearfully repeating again and again: ‘This is the best day of my life, for I am joining the Lord!’ ‘Yes!’ cried the pastors and the philanthropic ladies. ‘It is indeed your happiest day, for you are joining the Lord!’ And all these people, afoot or in their carriages, followed Richard as he was taken to the scaffold in his ignominious cart. Finally they reached the scaffold. ‘Die, brother!’ they called out to him, ‘die in the Lord, because His grace has descended upon you too!’ And the next thing, brother Richard, covered with the kisses of all his brothers and sisters, was dragged up onto the scaffold, placed under the knife of the guillotine, had his head chopped off in the most brotherly fashion, and gained eternal bliss.

“Well, that is a quite typical story. The pamphlet about Richard was translated into Russian by some high-society Russian do-gooders of the Lutheran persuasion, and it was distributed free as a newspaper supplement, for the enlightenment of the Russian masses. The story is a good one because it reveals so much about a national mentality. While in Russia it may seem absurd to chop off one’s brother’s head just because he has become one’s brother and grace has descended upon him, I repeat once again that we have our native tricks that are hardly any better. Our traditional and most widespread national passion is inflicting pain through direct beating. Nekrasov has a poem in which a peasant whips his horse, aiming at the animal’s eyes—‘the horse’s gentle eyes.’ Is there anyone among us who hasn’t witnessed something of the sort? Well, it’s just typically Russian! Nekrasov describes the poor, feeble nag, trying in vain to pull an overloaded cart which is stuck in the mud. The peasant whips the nag, whips it savagely, and in the end, no longer knowing what he’s doing, continues to hit it, the act itself intoxicating him, hitting, whipping, on and on, frantically, as if saying, ‘Even if you can’t do it, pull! Die, but pull!’ The poor nag strains and strains in vain, and that’s when he lashes out at the defenseless creature’s tearful and ‘gentle eyes.’ The nag then makes a desperate effort, pulls the cart out of the mud, and moves forward, its whole body trembling, unable to breathe, walking somehow sideways, skipping in a strange, unnatural, horrible way. Nekrasov’s description is terrifying. But that was just a horse, after all, and God Himself gave us horses so we could whip them. We were taught that by the Tartars, who left us the whip to remember them by . . .

“But when one comes to think of it, people can be beaten too. I have noted down a detailed account of a well-educated, cultured gentleman and his wife flogging their own seven-year-old daughter. The papa is delighted that the twigs he uses to flog the child have knots in them. ‘That’ll add to the stinging effect,’ he declares and proceeds to use them on the little girl. I know for a fact that there are people who get more and more excited with every blow when they beat someone, until they experience a sensual joy, a real, voluptuous pleasure, stronger and stronger as they go on . . . They flog the girl for one minute . . . five minutes, they go on to ten, harder, faster, more stingingly. The child screams. Then the child can no longer scream, she’s gasping for air . . . ‘Ah, papa, papa, papa dear’ . . .

“Somehow, after one such frantic, diabolical, disgusting performance, the parents are brought to court. They engage a counsel, ‘a conscience for hire,’ as our peasants call lawyers. The counsel screams in his clients’ defense: ‘This concerns no one but the family! All right, so a father flogged his daughter, what of it? It only proves what strange times we are living in that this should be brought to court!’ The conscientious jury go out and come back with a verdict of ‘not guilty.’ The spectators roar with joy because the child torturer has been acquitted. Ah, if only I’d been present in that courtroom, I’d have gotten up and proposed at the top of my voice that a special scholarship grant should be named for this torturer. Yes, it was a charming picture.

“But I have even better stories about children than that, Alyosha. I have a quite impressive collection of such stories about our Russian children. There’s one about a little five-year-old girl, hated by her parents, who are described as ‘most respectable and socially prominent people, cultured and well educated.’ You see, I repeat, there is no doubt whatsoever that many people share this trait: a passion for inflicting pain on children, but just on children. These people may be kind and even behave with gentleness toward other adults of the human species, as any normal, humane, educated European would, but they love torturing children. In fact, in a sense, they even love the children because of the tortures they inflict upon them. What excites them is the utter helplessness of the little creatures, the angelic trustfulness of the child who has nowhere to turn for help—yes, that’s what sets the vicious blood of the torturer afire. Of course, we know that there are wild beasts lurking in every human being—the beast of explosive fury, the beast of sensuous intoxication that grows with the cries of the tortured victim, the unrestrained beast let off the chain, and the beast of sickness contracted in debauchery—diseased liver, gout, and all.

“And so these refined parents subjected their five-year-old girl to all kinds of torture. They beat her, kicked her, flogged her, for no reason that they themselves knew of. The child’s whole body was covered with bruises. Eventually they devised a new refinement. Under the pretext that the child dirtied her bed (as though a five-year-old deep in angelic sleep could be punished for that), they forced her to eat excrement, smearing it all over her face. And it was the mother who did it! And then that woman would lock her little daughter up in the outhouse until morning and she did so even on the coldest nights, when it was freezing. Just imagine the woman being able to sleep with the child’s cries coming from that infamous outhouse! Imagine the little creature, unable even to understand what is happening to her, beating her sore little chest with her tiny fist, weeping hot, unresentful, meek tears, and begging ‘gentle Jesus’ to help her, and all this happening in that icy, dark, stinking place! Do you understand this nonsensical thing, my dear friend, my brother, you gentle novice who is so eager to spend his life in the service of God? Tell me, do you understand the purpose of that absurdity? Who needs it and why was it created? They say that man could not do without it on earth, for otherwise he would not be able to learn the difference between good and evil. But I say I’d rather not know about their damned good and evil than pay such a terrible price for it. I feel that all universal knowledge is not worth that child’s tears when she was begging ‘gentle Jesus’ to help her! I’m not even talking about the sufferings of adults: they, at least, have eaten their apple of knowledge, so the hell with them. But it’s different when it comes to children. It seems I’m hurting you, Alyosha, my boy. You don’t look very well. I won’t go on if you don’t want me to.”

“Never mind. I want to suffer too,” Alyosha mumbled.

“One more little sketch then, the last, and that only because it’s a rather curious little story and a very typical one, and, above all, because I read it very recently in one of our anthologies, I believe it was in the 
Archives of the Old Times
. I must check on that. See, I’ve even forgotten where I read it. Well, this happened early in our nineteenth century, during the darkest days of serfdom—and, by the way, long live our Tsar Alexander II, the Liberator of the People! Well then, at the turn of this century, there lived a retired general, a man with the highest connections, a big landowner, one of those, you know (although even at that time there were only a few such left), who, upon retiring from the service of their country, feel sure that they have earned the right of life and death over those subjected to them. Yes, there used to be such people then. This general lived on his estate, which had two thousand serfs. He strutted around, feeling immensely important, and bullying his lesser neighbors as if they were hangers-on and clowns obliged to amuse him. He had hundreds of hounds and just about as many kennel attendants, all dressed in special livery and every one of them mounted.

“It so happened that one day an eight-year-old boy, playing in the courtyard, threw a stone and inadvertently hit the General’s favorite hound in the leg, injuring it. ‘Why is my favorite hound limping?’ the General demanded, and he was informed that the boy had hit it with a stone. ‘So it was you,’ the General said, looking the boy up and down. ‘Lock him up.’ They took the boy away from his mother and locked him up in the guardroom for the whole night. The next day, at dawn, the General rode out to the hunt in full dress, surrounded by his obsequious neighbors, hounds, kennel attendants, huntsmen, every one of them on horseback. All the serfs of the estate were summoned too, for their edification, and so was the boy’s mother. They brought the boy out of the guardroom. It was a bleak, foggy, raw day—an ideal day for hunting. The General ordered the boy stripped naked. The boy was shivering. He seemed paralyzed with fear. He didn’t dare utter a sound. ‘Off with him now, chase him!’ ‘Hey, you, run, run!’ a flunkey yelled, and the boy started to run. ‘Sic ’im!’ the General roared. The whole pack was set on the boy and the hounds tore him to pieces before his mother’s eyes. I believe that, as a result of this, the General was later declared incompetent to administer his own estates without an appointed supervisory body . . . But perhaps you could tell me what should have been done in this case? Perhaps he ought to have been shot, to satisfy the moral indignation that such an act arouses in us? Well, speak up, my boy, go on!”

“Yes, shot . . .” Alyosha murmured, raising his eyes to his brother with a strange, faint, twisted grin.