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

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 honourable 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-humoured 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?”

 

“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 pere,’ answers the sinner with tears

of penitence, ‘Ca lui fait tant de plaisir, et a 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-”

 

* Ah, my father, this gives him so much pleasure, and me so little

pain!

 

“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, agonisingly 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 asthetic

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 aesthetically 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, 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 honour 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 course, would

mean the end of everything, even of magazines and newspapers, for

who would take them in? I know that at the end of all things I shall

be reconciled. I, too, shall walk my quadrillion and learn the secret.

But till that happens I am sulking and fulfil my destiny though it’s

against the grain-that is, to ruin thousands for the sake of saving

one. How many souls have had to be ruined and how many honourable

reputations destroyed for the sake of that one righteous man, Job,

over whom they made such a fool of me in old days! Yes, till the

secret is revealed, there are two sorts of truths for me-one, their

truth, yonder, which I know nothing about so far, and the other my

own. And there’s no knowing which will turn out the better…. Are you

asleep?”

 

“I might well be,” Ivan groaned angrily. “All my stupid ideas-outgrown, thrashed out long ago, and flung aside like a dead carcass

you present to me as something new!”

 

“There’s no pleasing you! And I thought I should fascinate you

by my literary style. That hosannah in the skies really wasn’t bad,

was it? And then that ironical tone a la Heine, eh?”

 

“No, I was never such a flunkey! How then could my soul beget a

flunkey like you?”

 

“My dear fellow, I know a most charming and attractive young

Russian gentleman, a young thinker and a great lover of literature and

art, the author of a promising poem entitled The Grand Inquisitor. I

was only thinking of him!”

 

“I forbid you to speak of The Grand Inquisitor,” cried Ivan,

crimson with shame.

 

“And the Geological Cataclysm. Do you remember? That was a poem,

now!”

 

“Hold your tongue, or I’ll kill you!”

 

“You’ll kill me? No, excuse me, I will speak. I came to treat

myself to that pleasure. Oh, I love the dreams of my ardent young

friends, quivering with eagerness for life! ‘There are new men,’ you

decided last spring, when you were meaning to come here, ‘they propose

to destroy everything and begin with cannibalism. Stupid fellows! they

didn’t ask my advice! I maintain that nothing need be destroyed,

that we only need to destroy the idea of God in man, that’s how we

have to set to work. It’s that, that we must begin with. Oh, blind

race of men who have no understanding! As soon as men have all of them

denied God-and I believe that period, analogous with geological

periods, will come to pass-the old conception of the universe will

fall of itself without cannibalism, and, what’s more, the old

morality, and everything will begin anew. Men will unite to take

from life all it can give, but only for joy and happiness in the

present world. Man will be lifted up with a spirit of divine Titanic

pride and the man-god will appear. From hour to hour extending his

conquest of nature infinitely by his will and his science, man will

feel such lofty joy from hour to hour in doing it that it will make up

for all his old dreams of the joys of heaven. Everyone will know

that he is mortal and will accept death proudly and serenely like a

god. His pride will teach him