The Reification of Evil and The Failure of Theodicy: The Devil in ...

who dies and appears before a judge in the Hereafter. He informs the judge that he had
renounced earthly pleasure in order to receive his compensation in the Hereafter, and now wants
to claim his reward. To his distress, the judge informs him that he has been laboring under an
illusion: all people must choose between hope and enjoyment, and whoever chooses one
renounces the other. His pleasure, such as it was, consisted of the hope he derived, during life,
from his own self-denial. Ivan, in mouthing the words of Schiller, thus resembles the younger
Dostoevsky, who also read – and adored – Schiller. The older Dostoevsky, however, could
hardly have endorsed such as philosophy, “tainted” with Europeanism as it was. He referred
rather disdainfully to “Schillerism” when people adopted Schiller’s approach to life – despite the
fact that the young Dostoevsky was one such person. Probably for that reason, after he
repudiated Schiller, he was especially harsh to Schiller and “Schillerism” in his later life.
27 For the purposes of this essay, I have focused on Ivan’s relationship with Smerdyakov,
especially the transmutation of Smerdyakov into the Devil that appears to Ivan in his madness, in
chapters 6-9 of Book XI. There are many other strands to this descent, not least his relationship
with the maddening Katerina Ivanovna, and miscarriage of justice in Dmitri’s trial.
28 Dmitri and his father are at odds both over money and as a result of their sexual rivalry for
Grushenka. Dmitri believes that his father has cheated him out of a part of inheritance. Indeed,
it is not clear whether this is true or not, but the money is part of a motif of the ever-mutating
3000 rubles – also the amount that ties Dmitri and his “fiancé”, Katerina Ivanovna, together.
The money also becomes instrumental in Dmitri’s trial: although Dmitri seems to have spent this
amount in revelry with Grushenka, in fact he reserved approximately half of this amount in an
amulet he wears on his chest. But tracing the money in The Brothers Karamazov is as difficult
as tracing the pea in an expertly played shell game.
29 BK, Book 5, chapter 7, p. 279. Constance Garnett translates the word as “clever”.
30 But then, why does he say that Ivan should travel to Chermashnya rather than Moscow, when
the latter is further away? Aside from allowing Smerdyakov to pretend to worry about Fyodor
Pavlovich and cast suspicion on Dmitri, Chermashnya has an almost talismanic appeal to
Smerdyakov, as a symbol of the complicity between himself and Ivan.
31 In addition to Ivan’s possible, if unconscious, complicity in the crime, Dostoevsky seems to
use Ivan’s unwilling attraction to the repulsive Smerdyakov as an example of the attractiveness,
for many intellectuals, of the repulsive doctrine of atheism. The seeming attractiveness of
atheism and nihilism were, for Dostoevsky, the Problem of the Age.
32 It should be recalled that it is the narrator of the novel, and not necessarily Dostoevsky
himself, who calls Alyosha the hero of the novel. Many critics have argued that Dostoevsky’s
planned, but unwritten, second part of The Brothers Karamazov might have demonstrated
Alyosha’s heroism more explicitly, but that there is little basis for seeing Alyosha as heroic in
the first (and only written) part of the novel. I believe, however, that here, as in his narratology,
Dostoevsky was even further ahead of his time than most people realize. We have no difficulty
in accepting certain characters of 20 th century novels, portrayed as ordinary people, as heroes –