The Icon and the Axe

However repelled by the idea of a coming rational social Utopia, Dostoevsky was fascinated by it. This was the "Geneva idea," so called perhaps because it represented a melange of the ideas of two famous Genevans: Calvin's moral puritanism and Rousseau's boundless faith in human perfectibility and equality. Dostoevsky's own image of the new social order was in part drawn from impressions of Switzerland and tales of Bakunin; and it is to Jura, Switzerland, center of Bakunin's revolutionary socialist activities at that time, that Stavrogin makes his final flight abroad. He becomes "like Herzen a naturalized citizen of the Canton of Jura" just before he returns by railroad to commit suicide; just as Kirillov's last self-applied name before his suicide was "citoyen du monde civilise."

The "Geneva idea," with its emphasis on the bourgeois ideal of citizenship, is less attractive to Dostoevsky than the "dream of the golden age,"

which we first meet in Stavrogin's confession and which is presented much more sympathetically in A Raw Youth, the otherwise less successful novel that he wrote in the mid-seventies, between The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov. A Raw Youth was published in the populist journal Annals of the Fatherland, and presents a generally more complimentary picture of radical aspirations than The Possessed. An older figure dreams of the golden age of perfect harmony after seeing Claude Lorraine's painting "Acis and Galatea" in Dresden; Dostoevsky interjects:

Marvelous dream, lofty error of mankind. The golden age is the most implausible of all the dreams that ever have been, but for it men have given up their life and all their strength, for the sake of it prophets have died and been slain, without it the people will not live and cannot die….

But Rousseauism becomes merged with Christianity in this new, more positive image of the golden age. For the old man concludes:

… I always complete my picture with Heine's vision of "Christ on the Baltic Sea." I could not get along without Him. He comes to them, holds out His hands, and asks them, "How could they forget Him?" And then, as it were, the scales would fall from their eyes and there would break forth the great rapturous hymn of the new and last resurrection.

In The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky anatomizes this myth of a Christianized Utopia. His famed "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" depicts the fundamental split within this very dream between social and material well-being and the freely given love of Christ. The Inquisitor defends his authoritarianism as a form of philanthropy which keeps ordinary people from being weighed down by the "unbearable burden" of freedom. The people, he points out, are grateful for the assurance of daily bread and are dependent on-even attached to-his despotic leadership.

Dostoevsky's Inquisitor represents all political authority which recognizes no higher principle than the effectiveness of its own exercise. He is a dedicated, rational man; and it is these qualities that make authoritarianism, whether Catholic or socialist, so seductive.

The Inquisitor claims to have improved on Christ's work, to have remedied the mistakes Christ made in not succumbing to the temptations in the wilderness. He incarnates the principle of "truth without Christ," the cold certainty of the crystal palace, of Euclid's geometry and Claude Bernard's physiology, which Dostoevsky felt must inevitably be extended to a society not carrying within itself the image and ideal of Christ.

But Dostoevsky had written long ago that

I am a child of the age, a child of unbelief and scepticism; I have been so far, and shall be I know to the grave … if anyone proved to me that Christ was not the truth, and it really was a fact that the truth was not in Christ, I would rather be with Christ than with the truth.27

Alyosha Karamazov reacts to the legend which his brother Ivan relates by saying: "Your inquisitor does not believe in God, that is his secret." But his real secret seems to be that he believes in God without Christ. Dostoevsky, following Belinsky, seems to believe in Christ even without God. Ivan Karamazov's recitation of human cruelties and atrocities just before reciting the legend leads him to "return his ticket of admission" to heaven and, in effect, accuse God of being the author of human suffering. The only explicit answer given to the Inquisitor is the final kiss of the silent Christ: an implausible, almost desperate call for freely given love as the only Christlike answer to human pride.