JOSEPH FRANK
271
beginning to be frightened and stands ready to scream, with its eyes
fixed on the object of its fear.. .. The blow fell on her skull, split–
ting it open from the top of the forehead almost to the crown of the
head and felling her instantly.
One would be hard put to match such grisly details in either Euro–
pean or Russian novels of the same period, but their effect is ultimately
offset by the intensity of Raskolnikov's inner suffering and his final
inability to endure his total estrangement from the rest of humanity.
Besides the murders, there is perhaps the even more shocking metamor–
phosis, in Svidrigailov's dream, of the pitiful little five-year-old girl he
stumbles on, shivering and crying, who a bit later smiles at him seduc–
tively "with the face of a courtesan, the brazen face of a mercenary
French harlot." This anticipates Stavrogin's pedophilia, but is immedi–
ately countered by Svidrigailov's appalled reaction and his own suicide
that follows shortly thereafter. Even Dostoevsky's deepest-dyed villain,
himself guilty of despicable crimes, cannot endure this vision of childish
innocence transformed into shameless vice.
One can find example after example in Dostoevsky's works of the
same boldness in depicting evil at work and the same effort to overcome
its effects. But there is no point in continuing to pile up passages; we can
go directly to his last and greatest work,
The Brothers Karamazov,
in
which this issue is raised explicitly with a towering power and brilliance
that makes it one of the few rivals to the Old Testament Book of Job.
Nowhere else in Dostoevsky-nowhere, perhaps, since Dante and Mil–
ton-can we find a panoply of horrors displayed in such profusion. The
Turks who cut children from their mother's womb, or throw others who
have been born into the air to catch on their bayonets while mothers
look on; the "feeble little nag" mercilessly beaten "on its weeping, on
its 'meek eyes'" (a detail already used in
Crime and Punishment);
the
poor little five-year-old girl brutally beaten, thrashed and kicked by
"cultured parents," then locked in an outhouse and forced to eat her
excrement; the serf-boy torn to death by hunting dogs before his
mother's eyes for having thrown a stone that lamed a favorite dog- all
this leads Ivan Karamazov to denounce God and the world of "diabol–
ical good and evil" that He created.
Shortly after sending off this section of the novel, which also contains
the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, Dostoevsky wrote in a letter that
Ivan's devastating accusation would be answered by the preachments of
Father Zosima. But many readers, myself included, have found these
worthy sentiments, no matter how impressively and movingly
