THE GRAND INQUISITOR
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and attitude in him, a tension between sympathies and antipathies,
finding its release in this complicity. He fully depends on it in the
creation of his characters; and the few from whom he withholds it
are reduced to stereotypes, as, for example, Grushenka's Polish suitor
and the student-radical Rakitin in
The Brothers Karamazov.
Crea–
tures of their author's political malice, they fall below the level of
the world into which he injects them.
Ivan, on the other hand, it has frequently been observed, is the
figure in the novel to whom as author he most readily gives himself
in the process of identification.
1
This must be taken into account in
examining the Legend recounted by Ivan to his brother Alyosha in
the course of that prolonged dialogue which is perhaps the most auda–
cious and masterful in the whole of Dostoevsky. Ivan calls the Legend
"a poem in prose" that he had not written down but simply made up,
as he says, and he tells it to Alyosha in order to support, in a manner
at once dramatic and metaphysically provocative, his denial not so
much of God as of His creation. The denial consists of a relentless
scrutiny of man in general, and particularly Christian man, in the
light of what he has made of history and history has made of him.
In his assault on God and the traditional faith Ivan proceeds
in a way that transcends the rationalistic argumentation of the old–
time atheists. For him it can no longer be a question of attempting
to disprove God's existence logically. Ivan is not one to permit his
intellectual faculties to linger in the modes of the past. He has made
the essentially modern leap from the static framework of analytic
thinking to thinking in terms of the historical process. But his leap
is made in the typical Russian fashion of that epoch. That is to say,
it lands him not in the somewhat placid "historicism" then prevailing
in the consciousness of the West but in the eschatological frame of
mind common to the Russian intelligentsia of the latter part of the
past century. For whatever their outlook, whether revolutionary or
not, inclined to nihilism or given to apocalyptic visions, in the main
those people tended to see history as verging toward the ultimate
and bringing forth a final solution compounded either of pure good
1 My impression is that the identification is more on the intellectual plane
than on that of intimate subjectivity. But of course in Dostoevsky ideas are
never divorced from feeling; in his critical statements he was wont to link them
by inventing such new-fangled terms as "idea-forces" and "idea-feelings." In
her memoirs Aimee Dostoevsky recalls the family tradition that her father, in
looking back to his youth, "portrayed himself in the person of Ivan."
