The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky [children's books read aloud TXT] 📗

honey and salt in the bathhouse. Solely

to get an extra bath I went, smeared myself all over and it did me

no good at all. In despair I wrote to Count Mattei in Milan. He sent

me a book and some drops, bless him, and, only fancy, Hoff’s malt

extract cured me! I bought it by accident, drank a bottle and a half

of it, and I was ready to dance, it took it away completely. I made up

my mind to write to the papers to thank him, I was prompted by a

feeling of gratitude, and only fancy, it led to no end of a bother:

not a single paper would take my letter. ‘It would be very

reactionary,’ they said, ‘none will believe it. Le diable n’existe

point.* You’d better remain anonymous,’ they advised me. What use is a

letter of thanks if it’s anonymous? I laughed with the men at the

newspaper office; ‘It’s reactionary to believe in God in our days,’

I said, ‘but I am the devil, so I may be believed in.’ ‘We quite

understand that,’ they said. ‘Who doesn’t believe in the devil? Yet it

won’t do, it might injure our reputation. As a joke, if you like.’ But

I thought as a joke it wouldn’t be very witty. So it wasn’t printed.

And do you know, I have felt sore about it to this day. My best

feelings, gratitude, for instance, are literally denied me simply from

my social position.”

 

* The devil does not exist.

 

“Philosophical reflections again?” Ivan snarled malignantly.

 

“God preserve me from it, but one can’t help complaining

sometimes. I am a slandered man. You upbraid me every moment with

being stupid. One can see you are young. My dear fellow,

intelligence isn’t the only thing! I have naturally a kind and merry

heart. ‘I also write vaudevilles of all sorts.’ You seem to take me

for Hlestakov grown old, but my fate is a far more serious one. Before

time was, by some decree which I could never make out, I was

predestined ‘to deny’ and yet I am genuinely good-hearted and not at

all inclined to negation. ‘No, you must go and deny, without denial

there’s no criticism and what would a journal be without a column of

criticism?’ Without criticism it would be nothing but one

‘hosannah.’ But nothing but hosannah is not enough for life, the

hosannah must be tried in the crucible of doubt and so on, in the same

style. But I don’t meddle in that, I didn’t create it, I am not

answerable for it. Well, they’ve chosen their scapegoat, they’ve

made me write the column of criticism and so life was made possible.

We understand that comedy; I, for instance, simply ask for

annihilation. No, live, I am told, for there’d be nothing without you.

If everything in the universe were sensible, nothing would happen.

There would be no events without you, and there must be events. So

against the grain I serve to produce events and do what’s irrational

because I am commanded to. For all their indisputable intelligence,

men take this farce as something serious, and that is their tragedy.

They suffer, of course… but then they live, they live a real life,

not a fantastic one, for suffering is life. Without suffering what

would be the pleasure of it? It would be transformed into an endless

church service; it would be holy, but tedious. But what about me? I

suffer, but still, I don’t live. I am x in an indeterminate

equation. I am a sort of phantom in life who has lost all beginning

and end, and who has even forgotten his own name. You are laughing-no, you are not laughing, you are angry again. You are for ever angry,

all you care about is intelligence, but I repeat again that I would

give away all this superstellar life, all the ranks and honours,

simply to be transformed into the soul of a merchant’s wife weighing

eighteen stone and set candles at God’s shrine.”

 

“Then even you don’t believe in God?” said Ivan, with a smile of

hatred.

 

“What can I say?- that is, if you are in earnest-”

 

“Is there a God or not?” Ivan cried with the same savage

intensity.

 

“Ah, then you are in earnest! My dear fellow, upon my word I don’t

know. There! I’ve said it now!”

 

“You don’t know, but you see God? No, you are not someone apart,

you are myself, you are I and nothing more! You are rubbish, you are

my fancy!”

 

“Well, if you like, I have the same philosophy as you, that

would be true. Je pense, donc je suis,* I know that for a fact; all

the rest, all these worlds, God and even Satan-all that is not

proved, to my mind. Does all that exist of itself, or is it only an

emanation of myself, a logical development of my ego which alone has

existed for ever: but I make haste to stop, for I believe you will

be jumping up to beat me directly.”

 

* I think, therefore I am.

 

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

 

“There is an anecdote precisely on our subject, or rather a

legend, not an anecdote. You reproach me with unbelief; you see, you

say, yet you don’t believe. But, my dear fellow, I am not the only one

like that. We are all in a muddle over there now and all through

your science. Once there used to be atoms, five senses, four elements,

and then everything hung together somehow. There were atoms in the

ancient world even, but since we’ve learned that you’ve discovered the

chemical molecule and protoplasm and the devil knows what, we had to

lower our crest. There’s a regular muddle, and, above all,

superstition, scandal; there’s as much scandal among us as among

you, you know; a little more in fact, and spying, indeed, for we

have our secret police department where private information is

received. Well, this wild legend belongs to our middle ages-not

yours, but ours-and no one believes it even among us, except the

old ladies of eighteen stone, not your old ladies I mean, but ours.

We’ve everything you have, I am revealing one of our secrets out of

friendship for you; though it’s forbidden. This legend is about

Paradise. There was, they say, here on earth a thinker and

philosopher. He rejected everything, ‘laws, conscience, faith,’ and,

above all, the future life. He died; he expected to go straight to

darkness and death and he found a future life before him. He was

astounded and indignant. ‘This is against my principles!’ he said. And

he was punished for that… that is, you must excuse me, I am just

repeating what I heard myself, it’s only a legend… he was

sentenced to walk a quadrillion kilometres in the dark (we’ve

adopted the metric system, you know): and when he has finished that

quadrillion, the gates of heaven would be opened to him and he’ll be

forgiven-”

 

“And what tortures have you in the other world besides the

quadrillion kilometres?” asked Ivan, with a strange eagerness.

 

“What tortures? Ah, don’t ask. In old days we had all sorts, but

now they have taken chiefly to moral punishments- ‘the stings of

conscience’ and all that nonsense. We got that, too, from you, from

the softening of your manners. And who’s the better for it? Only those

who have got no conscience, for how can they be tortured by conscience

when they have none? But decent people who have conscience and a sense

of honour 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 kilometres, 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 kilometres? 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 kilometres 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