THE GRAND INQUISITOR
2bl
"Yes, that's it," Belinsky agreed with surprising alacrity. "He would
follow the socialists and certainly join them."
"Feed men, and then ask of them virtue! " is the Inquisitor's
blunt way of stating Belinsky's protest against the demands made on
abused and hungry men in the name of the Christian ethic.
s
Dostoev–
sky, ignoring with typical guile the concrete political meaning of this
protest, which lay in the struggle against arbitrary power and oppres–
sive institutions, transposed the issue to the philosophical plane and
applied himself to disclosing the implications of unfreedom and re–
fusal of moral responsibility in his antagonist's position. He contin–
ued his quarrel with Belinsky through the years; but the particular
formulation of "stones turned into bread" he first hit upon in the
May 1776 issue of
The Diary of a Writer,
where he analyzed the
case of a young girl by the name of Pisareva who had committed
suicide and whose letter taking leave of her friends had been printed
in the newspapers. Pisareva, the daughter of formerly well-to-do
landowners, came to Petersburg, as Dostoevsky put it in his article,
"to pay her respects to progress and become a midwife ... but not
finding enough significance in earthly medicine and undergoing moral
fatigue took her life." He seized upon a part of her letter containing
very precise instructions as to the disposal of her petty savings to
preach a sermon on the materialistic leanings of the younger genera–
tion. "The importance attached to money is perhaps the last echo of
the chief prejudice of her life, that of 'stones turned into bread.' In
short, here we come upon the leading conviction that if all were eco–
nomically secure
all
would be happy and if there were no poor people
there would be no crime. There is no such thing as crime. It is a
morbid state, induced by poverty and unfortunate circumstances, etc.,
etc. This comprises the small, conventional, terribly characteristic and
ultimate catechism with which they enter life ... a catechism which
they substitute for the living life, for bonds with the soil, faith in the
truth, everything, everything." Thereupon the musician V. V. Alexyev
wrote to Dostoevsky to inquire about his quotation from the Gospels,
the phrase "stones turned into bread." To this query from a reader
he replied at length, explaining the import of "bread and stones" in
5 This is of course a recurrent theme of all radical literature, e.g., BertoIt
Brecht's famous line in the
Dreigroschen Oper: Erst kommt das Fressen, dann
kommt die Moral.
