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

Chapter 4

Rebellion

 

“I MUST make one confession” Ivan began. “I could never understand

how one can love one’s neighbours. It’s just one’s neighbours, to my

mind, that one can’t love, though one might love those at a

distance. I once read somewhere of John the Merciful, a saint, that

when a hungry, frozen beggar came to him, he took him into his bed,

held him in his arms, and began breathing into his mouth, which was

putrid and loathsome from some awful disease. I am convinced that he

did that from ‘self-laceration,’ from the self-laceration of

falsity, for the sake of the charity imposed by duty, as a penance

laid on him. For anyone to love a man, he must be hidden, for as

soon as he shows his face, love is gone.”

 

“Father Zossima has talked of that more than once,” observed

Alyosha; “he, too, said that the face of a man often hinders many

people not practised in love, from loving him. But yet there’s a great

deal of love in mankind, and almost Christ-like love. I know that

myself, Ivan.”

 

“Well, I know nothing of it so far, and can’t understand it, and

the innumerable mass of mankind are with me there. The question is,

whether that’s due to men’s bad qualities or whether it’s inherent

in their nature. To my thinking, Christ-like love for men is a miracle

impossible on earth. He was God. But we are not gods. Suppose I, for

instance, suffer intensely. Another can never know how much I

suffer, because he is another and not I. And what’s more, a man is

rarely ready to admit another’s suffering (as though it were a

distinction). Why won’t he admit it, do you think? Because I smell

unpleasant, because I have a stupid face, because I once trod on his

foot. Besides, there is suffering and suffering; degrading,

humiliating suffering such as humbles me-hunger, for instance-my

benefactor will perhaps allow me; but when you come to higher

suffering-for an idea, for instance-he will very rarely admit

that, perhaps because my face strikes him as not at all what he

fancies a man should have who suffers for an idea. And so he

deprives me instantly of his favour, and not at all from badness of

heart. Beggars, especially genteel beggars, ought never to show

themselves, but to ask for charity through the newspapers. One can

love one’s neighbours in the abstract, or even at a distance, but at

close quarters it’s almost impossible. If it were as on the stage,

in the ballet, where if beggars come in, they wear silken rags and

tattered lace and beg for alms dancing gracefully, then one might like

looking at them. But even then we should not love them. But enough

of that. I simply wanted to show you my point of view. I meant to

speak of the suffering of mankind generally, but we had better confine

ourselves to the sufferings of the children. That reduces the scope of

my argument to a tenth of what it would be. Still we’d better keep

to the children, though it does weaken my case. But, in the first

place, children can be loved even at close quarters, even when they

are dirty, even when they are ugly (I fancy, though, children never

are ugly). The second reason why I won’t speak of grown-up people is

that, besides being disgusting and unworthy of love, they have a

compensation-they’ve eaten the apple and know good and evil, and they

have become ‘like gods.’ They go on eating it still. But the

children haven’t eaten anything, and are so far innocent. Are you fond

of children, Alyosha? I know you are, and you will understand why I

prefer to speak of them. If they, too, suffer horribly on earth,

they must suffer for their fathers’ sins, they must be punished for

their fathers, who have eaten the apple; but that reasoning is of

the other world and is incomprehensible for the heart of man here on

earth. The innocent must not suffer for another’s sins, and especially

such innocents! You may be surprised at me, Alyosha, but I am

awfully fond of children, too. And observe, cruel people, the violent,

the rapacious, the Karamazovs are sometimes very fond of children.

Children while they are quite little-up to seven, for instance-are

so remote from grown-up people they are different creatures, as it

were, of a different species. I knew a criminal in prison who had,

in the course of his career as a burglar, murdered whole families,

including several children. But when he was in prison, he had a

strange affection for them. He spent all his time at his window,

watching the children playing in the prison yard. He trained one

little boy to come up to his window and made great friends with

him…. You don’t know why I am telling you all this, Alyosha? My head

aches and I am sad.”

 

“You speak with a strange air,” observed Alyosha uneasily, “as

though you were not quite yourself.”

 

“By the way, a Bulgarian I met lately in Moscow,” Ivan went on,

seeming not to hear his brother’s words, “told me about the crimes

committed by Turks and Circassians in all parts of Bulgaria through

fear of a general rising of the Slavs. They burn villages, murder,

outrage women and children, they nail their prisoners by the ears to

the fences, leave them so till morning, and in the morning they hang

them-all sorts of things you can’t imagine. People talk sometimes

of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the

beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel.

The tiger only tears and gnaws, that’s all he can do. He would never

think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.

These Turks took a pleasure in torturing children, -too; cutting the

unborn child from the mothers womb, and tossing babies up in the air

and catching them on the points of their bayonets before their

mothers’ eyes. Doing it before the mothers’ eyes was what gave zest to

the amusement. Here is another scene that I thought very

interesting. Imagine a trembling mother with her baby in her arms, a

circle of invading Turks around her. They’ve planned a diversion: they

pet the baby, laugh to make it laugh. They succeed, the baby laughs.

At that moment a Turk points a pistol four inches from the baby’s

face. The baby laughs with glee, holds out its little hands to the

pistol, and he pulls the trigger in the baby’s face and blows out

its brains. Artistic, wasn’t it? By the way, Turks are particularly

fond of sweet things, they say.”

 

“Brother, what are you driving at?” asked Alyosha.

 

“I think if the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he

has created him in his own image and likeness.”

 

“Just as he did God, then?” observed Alyosha.

 

“‘It’s wonderful how you can turn words,’ as Polonius says in

Hamlet,” laughed Ivan. “You turn my words against me. Well, I am glad.

Yours must be a fine God, if man created Him in his image and

likeness. You asked just now what I was driving at. You see, I am fond

of collecting certain facts, and, would you believe, I even copy

anecdotes of a certain sort from newspapers and books, and I’ve

already got a fine collection. The Turks, of course, have gone into

it, but they are foreigners. I have specimens from home that are

even better than the Turks. You know we prefer beating-rods and

scourges-that’s our national institution. Nailing ears is unthinkable

for us, for we are, after all, Europeans. But the rod and the

scourge we have always with us and they cannot be taken from us.

Abroad now they scarcely do any beating. Manners are more humane, or

laws have been passed, so that they don’t dare to flog men now. But

they make up for it in another way just as national as ours. And so

national that it would be practically impossible among us, though I

believe we are being inoculated with it, since the religious

movement began in our aristocracy. I have a charming pamphlet,

translated from the French, describing how, quite recently, five years

ago, a murderer, Richard, was executed-a young man, I believe, of

three and twenty, who repented and was converted to the Christian

faith at the very scaffold. This Richard was an illegitimate child who

was given as a child of six by his parents to some shepherds on the

Swiss mountains. They brought him up to work for them. He grew up like

a little wild beast among them. The shepherds taught him nothing,

and scarcely fed or clothed him, but sent him out at seven to herd the

flock in cold and wet, and no one hesitated or scrupled to