IV. Бунт

It is precisely one's neighbors, to my mind, whom it is impossible to love — at most, perhaps, those far away.

I once read somewhere about "John the Merciful" (a certain saint), how, when a starving and frostbitten passerby came to him and begged to be warmed, he lay down with him in his bed, embraced him, and began to breathe into his mouth, festering and foul with some dreadful disease.

I am convinced he did it with the strain of a lie, out of a love commanded by duty, out of a penance he had laid upon himself.

To love a man, he must keep himself hidden; the moment he shows his face — love is gone.

"The elder Zosima spoke of this more than once," Alyosha remarked; "he too used to say that a man's face often gets in the way of loving, for many people still inexperienced in love."

But surely there is also much love in mankind, and almost akin to the love of Christ — this I know for myself, Ivan…

"Well, I for one do not yet know it, and cannot understand it, and a countless multitude of people are with me in that."

The question, after all, is whether this comes from people's bad qualities, or simply because such is their nature.

To my mind, Christ's love for men is, in its own kind, a miracle impossible on earth.

True, He was God.

But we are not gods.

Suppose that I, for instance, am capable of suffering deeply; yet another man can never know to what degree I suffer, because he is another and not I, and, what is more, a man rarely consents to acknowledge another as a sufferer (as though it were a rank to be conferred).

Why will he not consent — what do you think?

Because, for instance, I smell bad, because I have a stupid face, because I once trod on his foot.

Besides, there is suffering and suffering: a degrading suffering, one that humiliates me — hunger, say — my benefactor will still allow me; but a slightly loftier suffering, for an idea, say — no, that he will allow only in rare cases, because he will, for instance, look at me and suddenly see that my face is not at all the sort that, by his fancy, a man suffering for such-and-such an idea ought to have.

And so he at once withholds his benefactions from me — and not even out of an evil heart.

Beggars, and especially well-born beggars, ought never to show themselves in the open, but should ask for alms through the newspapers.

In the abstract one can still love one's neighbor, and even at times from a distance, but up close almost never.

If everything were as it is on the stage, in a ballet, where the beggars, when they appear, come on in silken rags and tattered lace and beg for alms while dancing gracefully — well, then one might still admire them.

Admire them — but still not love them.

But enough of this.

I only needed to set you at my own point of view.

I meant to speak of the suffering of mankind in general, but we had better confine ourselves to the sufferings of children alone.

This will reduce the scope of my argument tenfold, but children alone are the better case.

So much the less to my advantage, of course.

But in the first place, little children one can love even up close, even dirty ones, even ill-favored ones (though it seems to me that little children are never ill-favored).

In the second place, I will not speak of grown-ups for the further reason that, besides being repulsive and undeserving of love, they have their requital: they ate the apple and came to know good and evil, and became "as gods."

And they go on eating it even now.

But the little ones have eaten nothing and are as yet guilty of nothing whatever.

Do you love little children, Alyosha?

I know that you do, and so you will understand why it is of them alone that I want to speak now.

If they too suffer terribly on earth, then it is of course for their fathers — punished for their fathers, who ate the apple — but that is reasoning from another world, incomprehensible to the human heart here on earth.

An innocent being cannot suffer for another, and such an innocent one at that!

Marvel at me, Alyosha: I too love little children terribly.

And mark this: cruel people, passionate, carnivorous — Karamazovs — sometimes love children very much.

Children, while they are children, up to the age of seven, say, stand frightfully apart from grown people: it is as though they were quite another creature, with another nature.

I knew a certain bandit in prison: in the course of his career, when he was slaughtering whole families in the houses he broke into at night to rob, it happened that he would cut the throats of a few children along with the rest.

But, sitting in prison, he loved them to a strange degree.

From the prison window all he ever did was watch the children playing in the prison yard.

He trained one little boy to come up under his window, and the boy grew very fond of him.

You do not know why I am telling you all this, Alyosha?

My head somehow aches, and I feel sad.

"You speak with a strange look," Alyosha remarked uneasily, "as though you were in some kind of madness."

"By the way, a certain Bulgarian in Moscow was telling me not long ago," Ivan Fyodorovich went on, as though not even listening to his brother, "how the Turks and Circassians over there in Bulgaria are committing atrocities everywhere, fearing a general uprising of the Slavs — that is, they burn, slaughter, rape women and children, nail prisoners' ears to fences with nails and leave them so till morning, and at dawn they hang them — and so on; the whole thing is beyond imagining."

In truth, people sometimes speak of the "beastly" cruelty of man, but this is dreadfully unjust and insulting to the beasts: a beast can never be as cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.

A tiger simply gnaws and tears, and that is all it knows how to do.

It would never enter its head to nail people up by the ears overnight with nails, even if it were able to do such a thing.

These Turks, among other things, tortured children with a kind of voluptuous pleasure, from cutting them with a dagger out of the mother's womb, to flinging nursing infants into the air and catching them on a bayonet before the eyes of their mothers.

It was the doing of it before the mothers' eyes that made the chief sweetness of it.

But here is one little scene that struck me especially.

Picture it: a nursing infant in the arms of its trembling mother, the Turks crowding in around them.

They have hit upon a merry little game: they fondle the baby, they laugh to make it laugh, and they succeed — the baby laughs.

At that very moment a Turk levels a pistol at it, about seven inches (four vershoks) from its face.

The little boy chortles with joy, reaches out with his little hands to grab the pistol, and suddenly the artist pulls the trigger straight into his face and shatters his little head.

Artistic, is it not?

By the way, the Turks, they say, are very fond of sweet things.

"Brother, what is all this for?" asked Alyosha.

"I think that if the devil does not exist, and was therefore created by man, then man created him in his own image and likeness."

"In that case, no less than he created God."

"You have an astonishing way of twisting words about, as Polonius says in 'Hamlet,'" Ivan laughed. "You have caught me on a word, so be it — I am glad."

A fine God you have, then, if man created him in his own image and likeness.

You just asked what all this is for: you see, I am a fancier and collector of certain little facts, and, believe me, I copy out and gather from newspapers and stories, wherever I come upon them, a certain sort of little anecdote, and I have a fine collection already.

The Turks, of course, have gone into the collection, but those are all foreigners.

I have homegrown specimens too, and even better than the Turkish ones.

You know, with us it is more a matter of beating, more the birch and the lash, and this is something national: with us, ears nailed up with nails are unthinkable — we are Europeans after all — but the birch, the lash, this is something already our own and cannot be taken from us.

Abroad they now seem hardly to beat at all — manners have grown refined, or such laws have been arranged that a man hardly dares to flog another man — but they have made it up to themselves in another way, and again one purely national, as it is with us, and so national that with us it would seem impossible, although, however, it does seem to be taking root with us too, especially since the time of the religious movement in our higher society.

I have a charming little pamphlet, a translation from the French, about how in Geneva, very recently, only some five years ago, they executed a certain villain and murderer, Richard, a fellow of twenty-three, it seems, who repented and turned to the Christian faith just before the scaffold.