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555
end, and by a blind, compulsive drive that bears all the earmarks of
the psychopathic. It will be recalled that this monster of rationality is
reduced to a debilitating anxiety and to a kind of ecstatic frenzy, and
that, in a remarkably suggestive way, he plays with his criminal
idea
just as a classic neurotic plays with his neurosis. At the same
time, as Raskolnikov ponders the implications of his act, he cannot
disassociate himself from Napoleon, the prototype of the historical
man who lets nothing stand in his way-and is he not justified by
history?
Similarly, Ivan Karamazov, who commits no overt act but who,
nevertheless, contains within himself all these cross-currents of com–
pulsion, guilt and moral responsibility, weighs the "eternal questions,"
as Dostoevsky calls them, of man's relation to himself and to his com–
munity. Again the social and the individual are blurred, as the murder
of the hated father is enmeshed in the mind of Ivan with the problem
of revolutionary violence. In the famous conversation between Ivan
and Alyosha, where the supreme artistry of Dostoevsky suddenly
brings all the issues to a head, Ivan asks his brother to what lengths he
would go for the good of man. "Imagine," says Ivan, "that you are
creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men
happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was
essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature–
that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance-and to found
that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the archi–
tect on these conditions?" The answer of Alyosha, the true Christian, is,
of course, no. Later on the same theme reappears wherr Ivan wrestles
with his feelings of guilt as a moral participant in the killing of his
father. For Smerdyakov, the actual murderer, has accused Ivan of
planting in his mind the idea that "everything is lawful," so long as
the end is either useful or inevitable. And in this case the victim was
nothing but an old "sinner" who exploited his lusts and his money,
wrecking and despoiling his family. Besides, as Ivan shrieked at the
trial, "who doesn't desire his father's death?" Nevertheless, Ivan can–
not escape his guilt, for in merely
wanting
the death of his father he
has been enveloped by the universal guilt of parricide, at once the
most natural and most immoral crime. And in attempting to justify the
criminal instinct by a jungle legality, Ivan is guilty of another violation
of the laws of good and evil. Here we have the complete Dostoevskian
story of man: his fall from the moral province of God into the morass
of evil sanctioned by reason, and his effort to redeem himself by
discovering his latent spirituality.
