its discourse about God. It involved a general whose hunting dog was wounded when a serf boy on his estate threw a stone. The general had the serf boy arrested, stripped naked in front of the other villagers, and, to the cries of his desperate mother, torn to shreds by a pack of hunting dogs. This incident is cited by Ivan, the rationalist philosopher among the three Karamazov brothers, to explain to Alyosha, his younger brother and a novice at the monastery, why he cannot believe in the existence of a God if his truth entails the suffering of little innocents.
'I say beforehand that the entire truth is not worth such a price. I do not want a mother to embrace the torturer who had her child torn to pieces by his dogs… Is there in the whole world a being who could or would have the right to forgive? I don't want harmony. I don't want harmony, out of a love for mankind, I don't want it.'68
In a letter to a friend Dostoesvky said that Ivan's argument was 'irrefutable'.69 In terms of moral feeling it was unacceptable to leave such torture unavenged, and even Alyosha, who tries to follow Christ's example of forgiveness, agrees with Ivan that the general should be shot. Here was the fundamental question which Dostoevsky posed, not just in this novel, but in all his life and art: How could one believe in God when the world created by him was so full of suffering? It was a question he was bound to ask when he looked at the society in which he lived. How could God have made Russia?
Dostoevsky came, in his own words, from a 'pious Russian family' where 'we knew the Gospel almost from the cradle'.70 The teaching of the Gospels always remained at the core of Dostoevsky's personality and even when, in the 1840s, he became a socialist, the type of socialism to which he subscribed had a close affinity with Christ's ideals. He agreed with Belinsky that if Christ appeared in Russia he 'would join the socialists'.71 In 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested as a member of a radical underground movement which met at the house of the young socialist Mikhail Petrashevsky in St Petersburg. His offence was to have read out Belinsky's by-then famous but forbidden letter to Gogol of 1847 in which the literary critic had attacked religion and called for social reform in Russia. It was even forbidden to circulate or read handwritten copies of the letter as Dostoevsky did. Dostoevsky and
his comrades were condemned to death, but at the final moment, when they were on the parade ground waiting to be shot, they received a reprieve from the Tsar. Dostoevsky's sentence was commuted to four years of prison labour in Siberia, followed by service as a private soldier in a front-line Siberian regiment.
Dostoevsky's years in the Omsk prison camp were to be the turning point of his life. They brought him face to face with the roughest and most brutal of the common people and gave him what he thought of as a special insight into the hidden depths of the Russian soul. 'All in all, the time hasn't been lost', he wrote to his brother in 1854. 'I have learned to know, if not Russia, then at least her people, to know them, as perhaps very few know them.'72 What Dostoevsky found among his fellow convicts was a level of depravity that shook him from his old intelligentsia belief in the people's innate goodness and perfectibility. In this underworld of murderers and thieves he found not a shred of human decency - only greed and guile, violent cruelty and drunkenness, and hostility to himself as a gentleman. But the most depressing aspect of it all, as he describes it in
I have already said that for a period of several years I saw among these people not the slightest trace of repentance, not one sign that their crime weighed heavily on their conscience, and that the majority of them consider themselves to be completely in the right. This is a fact. Of course, vanity, bad examples, foolhardiness and false shame are the causes of much of it. On the other hand, who can say that he has fathomed the depths of these lost hearts and has read in them that which is hidden from the whole world? It must surely have been possible over so many years to have noticed something, to have caught at least some feature of these hearts that bore witness to inner anguish, to suffering. But this was absent. Yet, it seems that crime cannot be comprehensible from points of view that are already given, and that its philosophy is rather more difficult than is commonly supposed.73
This dark vision of the human psyche was the inspiration for the murderers and thieves who populate the pages of Dostoevsky's post-Siberian novels, beginning with
And yet at the depths of his despair came a vision of redemption to
