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PARTISAN REVIEW
expressed, to be rather weak in the face of Ivan's accumulation of moral
monstrosities. Later, when the novel had been completed, Dostoevsky
wrote in his notebook-more accurately, in my view-that the
entire
work
was really the answer to these chapters. And this answer is given
by the triumph of moral conscience in the three main characters, as well
as in the murderer Smerdyakov. For while refusing to overlook that God
permits all the evils denounced by Ivan, Dostoevsky also remained firm
in his assurance that the God-man Jesus had been sent to stir the con–
science of mankind in its eternal struggle against iniquity.
This is hardly the place to explore in any detail the multiple ways in
which Dostoevsky's great novel embodies this theme. The most obvious
is Dimitry's last-minute inability, despite his seething rage and resent–
ment, to strike the fatal blow against his justifiably hated father. But the
most direct answer to Ivan's horror at the world God had created, and
which leads to his bitterly disillusioned declaration that "everything is
permitted," is given by the pages in which his own responsibility for the
murder begins to pierce through his consciousness. The gradual inner
awareness of his own culpability and his efforts to suppress it; the three
almost somnambulistic visits to Smerdyakov to seek reassurance; the
marvelous black comedy of the Devil's hallucinatory visit (a product of
Ivan's own schizophrenic psyche); his final collapse and mental break–
down-all this remains unsurpassed as an image of moral conscience at
work, a conscience for whose injunctions, as the Devil rightly mocks,
Ivan's reason offers no justification whatever.
It
is thus not the views of Father Zosima that give Dostoevsky'S novel
its enduring sublimity (quite the contrary!) but the masterly portrayal of
the influence of moral conscience, an influence in each case convincingly
adapted to the personality and situation of the character portrayed.
Such influence can be felt and understood quite independently of Dos–
toevsky'S own convictions (his view, for example, that conscience can–
not exist without a belief in immortality), or indeed, of those of the
readers themselves. So while Dostoevsky does not spare his readers the
evil that he so vividly represents, he invariably counterbalances its
effects by insisting on the ineradicability of a moral conscience that even
the most resistent evildoer will not be able to escape.
It
is time now, however, to return to Elizabeth Costello and examine
her plight a little more carefully. Why has the book of Paul West
brought on the crisis that had led her to the advocacy-reluctant, to be
sure-of an inner censorship? Describing what the author must have
intended, she speaks of it as a "wager with himself: to take as his sub–
ject a handful of bumbling German officers unfitted by the very code of
