Academic Studies Press

Chapter Title: “If there’s no immortality of the soul, . . . everything is lawful”: On the
Philosophical Basis of Ivan Karamazov’s Idea
Chapter Author(s): Sergei A. Kibalnik

Book Title: Dostoevsky Beyond Dostoevsky

Book Subtitle: Science, Religion, Philosophy
Book Editor(s): SVETLANA EVDOKIMOVA, VLADIMIR GOLSTEIN
Published by: Academic Studies Press. (2016)
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 VIII

“If there’s no immortality of the

soul, . . . everything is lawful”: On
the Philosophical Basis of Ivan
Karamazov’s Idea
Sergei A. Kibalnik

In its various versions, the popular formula “If there is no God, . . . everything is
lawful” is presented in many of Dostoevsky’s works. It plays an especially signif-
icant role in his novel The Brothers Karamazov. It is commonly known that
Dostoevsky determined “the main question which is asked” to be “the question
of God’s existence” (PSS, 29[1]:117).1 As he confessed, that was the question
that tormented him all his life.
In the second book of Brothers Karamazov, Piotr Miusov recites the words
of Ivan Karamazov, who claimed,

If there is and ever has been any love on earth, this is not from any natural law
but simply because people believed in immortality . . . precisely in this
consists the whole natural law, so that if you destroy humanity’s faith in
immortality, there will immediately dry up in it—not only love but also
every living force necessary to perpetuate life on earth. Even more: there will

1 Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh [PSS], ed. V. G. Bazanov et al.
(Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–90); hereafter cited as PSS by volume and page.

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166 Sergei A. Kibalnik

no longer be anything immoral, everything will be permissible, even

cannibalism. (PSS, 14:64–65)

Robert Louis Jackson shows the dialectics of this motive further developed in
Brothers Karamazov. Let me quote here a long passage from his Dialogues with
Dostoevsky, which will serve as a good introduction to my analysis:

The torment of Ivan Karamazov as God-struggler is that he allows for the

existence of a religious moral law but does not believe in the immortality of
his soul or the goodness of man. He is a victim, finally, of the fatal logic of his
position: believing absolutely in the concrete, as it were, day-to-day interde-
pendence of virtue and faith but lacking personal belief in immortality, he
arrives at the intellectual position that “all is permissible.” His moral nature
will not permit him openly to sanction the death of his father, but his ideas
are picked up by his disciple Smerdyakov, who implements them with a
ruthless logic.

The practical implications of Ivan’s proposition—“There is no virtue if there is

no immortality”—for an unbeliever are grasped immediately by Dmitry Kara-
mazov: “Excuse me . . . have I heard things right? ‘Villainy must not only be
permitted but even recognized as the inevitable and even rational outcome of
his position for every atheist’! Is that so or not?” “Precisely,” says Father Paissy.
“I’ll remember that,” says Dmitry. Dmitry draws these conclusions; in the end,
however, he does not act upon them. “If there is no eternal God, then there is
no virtue,” he reminds Ivan in his last meeting with him, adding, “And, indeed,
there’s really no necessity for it.”
It is this final conclusion, this simplistic deduction, this intoxicated
leap into crime and chaos—“And, indeed, there’s really no necessity for
it”—that lies hidden in Ivan’s speculations and deeply troubles Dostoevsky.
How is one to surmount the fatal logic of this either–or: either faith or
cannibalism, either beatitude or nihilistic despair? Such are the extreme
choices that inhere in Ivan’s notion that “there is no virtue if there is no
immortality.” “You are blessed in believing that, or else most unhappy,”
Zosima remarks perceptively addressing to Ivan. “Why unhappy?” Ivan
asks, smiling. “Because in all probability you don’t believe yourself in the
immortality of your soul.” Ivan has left himself, and mankind, little room for
maneuver or morality.

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 “If there’s no immortality of the soul, . . . everything is lawful” 167

Ivan finds nothing in man, no action of the eternal law in man’s conscious-
ness, to counteract his criminal tendencies to guide him toward salvation.
Hence his reliance on an authoritarian church-state. The position of Father
Zosima is quite different. Like Ivan, he believes in a universal church “at the end
of the ages.” In the meanwhile, however, he does not despair. While Ivan places
his hope in social-religious compulsion and excommunication, Zosima believes
in the divine law acting in man and in “the law of Christ expressing itself in the
recognition of one’s own conscience.” Zosima essentially affirms a faith in man’s
conscience, in the possibility of man freely arriving at a sense of truth and good-
ness through his own consciousness.2
Having placed this motive in the framework of Augustinian and Pelagian
theological controversy, Jackson quite reasonably concludes that “Ivan’s posi-
tion would seem to gravitate toward radical Augustinian doctrine, or Jansenism,
according to which post-Fall man lacks the power to abstain from sin and can be
saved only by virtue of God’s grace,” while Zosima’s thought “would seem to
gravitate in the direction of Pelagian doctrine, which places less emphasis on
the original sin and affirms man’s perfect freedom to do right and wrong and, in
the end, to discover his path of salvation.”3 According to Jackson, Ivan’s view-
point also evokes quite reasonable parallels with Thomas Hobbes’s ideas.4 For
her part, Valentina Vetlovskaya, in her commentaries published in the Academy
edition of Dostoevsky’s Complete Works, refers in this regard to Blaise Pascal
(PSS, 15:536). Yet, the question concerning the philosophical basis of this
motive in the framework of nineteenth-century European philosophy that was
contemporaneous for Dostoevsky is still open.
In a way, Ivan Karamazov’s formula (“If there is no God . . .”) already prom-
ises the next step, taken by Nietzsche, who in his The Gay Science, published
after Dostoevsky’s death, declared that “God is dead.” However, there was
another philosopher who, when Dostoevsky was young, claimed that God—at
least in his conventional concept—did not exist, pronouncing religion as the
“objectification” of human consciousness. This was Ludwig Feuerbach. The
above phrase is to be found in his book The Essence of Christianity (1841), of

2 Robert Louis Jackson, Dialogues with Dostoevsky: The Overwhelming Questions (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 295–98.
3 Ibid., 298.
4 Ibid., 297.

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168 Sergei A. Kibalnik

which, as noted by Sergei Bulgakov and then commented on by Vadim

Belopolsky and Igor Smirnov, Dostoevsky was aware. It had an impact on his
works, starting at least from Notes from the Dead House and Notes from
Underground.5
But in Ivan Karamazov’s formula, “If there’s no immortality of the soul . . .
everything is lawful” (PSS, 14:93), one can trace not only the impact of Feuer-
bach’s famous book but also of its critique made by another German philosopher
of the 1840s—Max Stirner, whose book The Ego and His Own, which was
published in the end of 1844, produced a shock in philosophical circles of
Europe.6 The influence of this philosopher on Dostoevsky was already discussed
by Nikolay Otverzhennyi and Sergei Kibalnik,7 and by Takayoshi Shimizu and
Marcos Galounis.8 Nevertheless, up to now there has been little attention
among Dostoevsky scholars to the fact that the first part of Stirner’s book
contains a sharp interpretation of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity as an
“abolition of faith” and that Stirner’s declaration of individualism and immor-
alism was a direct conclusion from Feuerbach’s anthropotheism. All moral
relations, affirms Stirner, “are ethical, are cultivated with a moral mind, only
where they rank as religious of themselves.”9 Since “higher powers exist only
through my exalting them and abasing myself,” my “relation to the world,”

5 S. N. Bulgakov, “Religiia chelovekobozhiia u L. Feierbakha,” in Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh

(Moscow: Nauka, 1993), 2:181. V. N. Belopolskii, Dostoevsky i filosofskaia mysl’ ego epokhi
(Rostov: Rostov University Press, 1987), 165–85. I. P. Smirnov, “Otchuzhdenie-v-otchuzhdenii:
‘Zapiski iz Mertvogo doma’ v kontekste evropeiskoi filosofii 1840 gg. (Feuerbach and Co.),”
in Kak literatura otzyvaetsia na filosofiiu (St. Petersburg: Petropolis, 2010), 59–72.
6 Max Stirner, Der Einzigee und sein Eigentum (Leipzig, 1845).
7 N. Otverzhennyi, Shtirner i Dostoevskii (Moscow: Golos truda, 1925); S. A. Kibalnik,
“Dostoevskii i Maks Shtirner,” in Dostoevskii i sovremennost’: Material XXVI Mezhdunarod-
nykh Starorusskikh chtenii (Velikii Novgorod: Novgorod Museum Press, 2012), 172–79; S.
A. Kibalnik, “On Dostoevsky’s Anti-Rationalism, Its European Parallels and Its Followers,”
in Russian Thought in Europe: Reception, Polemics, Development, ed. T. Obolevich, Thomasz
Homa, and Josef Bremer (Kraków: Wydawnictwo WAM, 2013), 73–92.
8 See abstracts of their papers: Takayoshi Shimizu, “Dostoevsky and Max Stirner,” accessed
March 25, 2016, http://catalog.lib.kyushu-u.ac.jp/handle/2324/24632/p%28vi%29.pdf;
Marcos Galounis, “Political Nihilism in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment,” paper given at
the 15th Simpozium Mezhdunarodnogo obshchestva Dostoevskogo “Dostoevskii i zhur-
nalism,” 34–35 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnoe obshchestvo Dostoevskogo, 2013).
9 Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, trans. Steven T. Byington, with an introduction by J. L.
Walker (New York: Benj. R. Tucker, 1907), 43; http://www.df.lth.se/~triad/stirner/
theego/theego.pdf. Hereafter I will use in-text citations by page number.

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 “If there’s no immortality of the soul, . . . everything is lawful” 169

claims Stirner, is that “I no longer do anything for it, ‘for God’s sake,’ I do
nothing ‘for man’s sake,’ but what I do I do ‘for my sake’” (158). An introduction
to Stirner’s book concludes with the declaration: “The divine is God’s concern;
the human, man’s. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the
true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is mine, and it is not a general one, but
is—unique, as I am unique. Nothing is more to me than myself!” (18).
The denial of not only God but of Feuerbach’s “God-man,” and the
declaration of “my self-enjoyment,” is the main idea of Stirner’s book. So,
Ivan Karamazov simply reproduces Stirner’s objection to Feuerbaсh when
he declares,

that for every individual, like ourselves, who does not believe in God or
immortality, the moral law of nature must immediately be changed into the
exact contrary of the former religious law, and that egoism, even to crime,
must become not only lawful but even recognised as the inevitable, the most
rational, even honourable outcome of his position. (PSS, 14:64–65)

Dostoevsky must have faced the above-mentioned ideas of Feuerbach and

Stirner as early as in the 1840s at the parties at Petrashevsky’s house. The writer
once made a speech there “about personality and individualism” in which he
“wanted to prove that there is more ambition than real human dignity between
us, and that we all fall into self-abasement, self-annihilation due to petty ambi-
tion, egoism, and aimlessness of occupations” (PSS, 18:129). This speech is
supposedly permeated with Stirner’s ideas. But if so, then it is actually directed
against them. Dostoevsky could have borrowed a copy of Stirner’s book from
Petrashevsky.
Apparently, Stirner’s ideas were shared by some other members of Petra-
shevsky’s circle, and first of all by Nikolay Speshnev, who is an obvious prototype
of several of Dostoevsky’s characters (e.g., Nikolay Stavrogin). As it was noted
in the commentaries for the Academy edition of the Complete Works of Dosto-
evsky, Speshnev, in his Letters to Khoetsky (1847), “criticizes Ludwig Feuerbach’s
anthropotheism”: “Anthropotheism is also a religion but a different one. There
is another object of deification—newly made, but the fact of deification itself is
not new. Instead of God-man now we have Man-god. Only the word order has
changed. Is there a big difference between God-man and Man-god?” (PSS,

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170 Sergei A. Kibalnik

12:222). The commentators argue that Speshnev “delicately criticizes anthro-

potheism” (ibid.).
However, here Speshnev does not offer his own criticism of the anthro-
potheism of Feuerbach but rather retells Stirner’s. And it is not accidental that
this letter was written in German. In Ego and His Own, we read: “Man has killed
God in order to become now—‘sole God on high.’” The other world outside us is
indeed brushed away, and the great undertaking of the Illuminators completed;
but the other world in us has become a new heaven and calls us forth to renewed
heaven-storming: “God has had to give place, yet not to us, but to—Man. How
can you believe that the God-man is dead before the Man in him, besides the
God, is dead?” (85). Speshnev also recalls Stirner’s thoughts in other passages
of his Letters to Khoetsky where he emphasizes the difference between “me” and
“man” in very similar words. For the sake of brevity, I omit here some textual
parallels.
It is obvious then that in the mid-1840s Speshnev was in a way Stirner’s
follower. (This was overlooked by Speshnev’s biographers, including Ludmila
Saraskina, the author of the most recent biography of Speshnev.)10 In 1845,
possibly after his reading Stirner, Speshnev called himself a man who “lost
shame.”11 At the time, he was living abroad with a Polish woman, who had left
her husband for him. That is why he must have enjoyed the dedication in
Stirner’s book: “TO MY SWEETHEART MARIE DÄHNHARDT” (even
though Marie was already Stirner’s wife when his book came out).
When Dostoevsky met Speshnev a few years later, he saw him as a strong
personality, and afterwards he recognized his extreme influence on his own
ideas. At one of Petrashevsky’s parties Speshnev gave a speech on religion in
which he denied the existence of God.12 Speshnev’s life and behavior in general
were marked by “willfulness” and, as is well known, brought to life the character
of Stavrogin. As we will see, he also played an essential part in Dostoevsky’s
shaping of Ivan Karamazov.
In his Letters to Khoetsky, Speshnev also predicted that “humanity won’t
stop at anthropotheism” and that “anthropotheism is not an eventual result, but

10 L. I. Saraskina, Nikolai Speshnev: Nesbyvshaiasia sud’ba (Moscow: Nash dom—L’Age

D’Homme, 2000).
11 Ibid., 125.
12 Ibid., 375.

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 “If there’s no immortality of the soul, . . . everything is lawful” 171

only a transitional theory. . . . To my mind, it is just a track, keeping [to] which

Germany and science will come to the complete and unconditional denial of
religion.”13 Here Speshnev also openly develops Stirner’s idea, which stated that
“the fear of God in the proper sense was shaken long ago, and a more or less
conscious ‘atheism,’ externally recognizable by a wide-spread ‘unchurchliness,’
has involuntarily become the mode. But what was taken from God has been
superadded to Man” (100).
Claiming that anthropotheism is just a route on which Germany and
science will come to a complete and absolute negation of religion, Speshnev,
along with Stirner, sounds similar to Dostoevsky, who regarded Feuerbach’s
philosophy as a serious step towards atheism. For Speshnev, atheism is an inev-
itable and justified stage: “And at last, is it really necessary to reduce all the data
of a certain period to one and the only idea?”14 But for Dostoevsky in the 1870s
it is, on the contrary, an alarming symptom.
Russian religious philosophers clearly saw Max Stirner’s philosophy as a
reaction to Essence of Christianity by Feuerbach. For example, Semion Frank, in
his Ethics of Nihilism, wrote: “Strictly logically, from nihilism in the moral field
one can conclude only nihilism, that is immoralism, and Stirner did not have
many difficulties while explaining this to Feuerbach and his followers.”15 Boris
Vysheslavtsev, in his Ethics of Transfigured Eros, came close to acknowledging
that Dostoevsky’s works were a philosophical reaction to the attempts to replace
God with man or with the self. 16
But the specific form of this reaction is a very controversial issue that is still
under debate. It is not quite clear whether Dostoevsky, while denying Stirner’s
position, takes Feuerbach’s side. There are some things in Brothers Karamazov
that make us think so. For example, Rakitin, who finds Ivan Karamazov’s way of
thinking outrageous, believes in a mankind. “Humanity will find in itself the
power to live for virtue even without believing in immortality. It will find it in
love for freedom, for equality, for fraternity” (PSS, 14:76). This recalls Feuer-
bach’s philosophy. Feuerbach, as he argued himself, “transformed ethics into

13 N. A. Speshnev, “Pis’ma k K.E. Khoetskomu,” in Filosofskie i obshchestvenno-politicheskie

proizvedeniia petrashevtsev (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1953), 496.
14 Ibid.
15 S. L. Frank, Sochineniia (Moscow: Pravda, 1990), 84–85.
16 B. P. Vysheslavtsev, Etika preobrazhennogo Erosa (Moscow: Respublika, 1994), 115–16.

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172 Sergei A. Kibalnik

religion.”17 Still, it is certainly meaningful that this approach is demonstrated by

the character whom the narrator calls “a young man bent on a career” (14:71).
Another character who “so loves humanity” that she “often dreams of forsaking”
her ill daughter and “becoming a sister of mercy” is Madame Khokhlakov, clearly
caricatured by Dostoevsky.
Obviously, Dostoevsky’s position is essentially different from those of
Rakitin and Madame Khokhlakov. And it is directly formulated in a section
of Diary of a Writer for 1876 called “Unsubstantiated Statements”: “I declare
(again, without substantiation, at least for the moment) that love for
humanity is even entirely unthinkable, uncomprehensible, and utterly impos-
sible without faith in the immortality of the human soul to go along with it”
(italics in the original).18 Jackson finds it significant that Dostoevsky’s
remarks are made in this particular section (also called “Arbitrary Assertions”
in another translation) and that Dostoevsky “prefaces his remarks by saying
that he intends ‘to amuse’ those ‘gentlemen of ironclad ideas’ who believe
that love for humanity and its happiness is all set, comes about cheaply and
without a thought. Dostoevsky’s above-cited remark is provocative and iron-
ical, and directed against interlocutors who have never really confronted or
deeply responded to real suffering.”19 But what is provocative in the following
Dostoevsky statement, which was more than once rephrased by him in other
works?—“My article ‘The Sentence’ concerns the fundamental and the loft-
iest idea of human existence: the necessity and the conviction that the
human soul is immortal”20 (PSS, 24:46). Isn’t Jackson trying to find in
Dostoevsky’s journalism the ambivalence that is fully present only in his
novels? But I do completely share his point of view “that in The Brothers
Karamazov Dostoevsky finds Ivan’s statement acceptable as a theological
truism, as an affirmation of the divine unity of all aspects of God’s world, but

17 Ludwig Feuerbach (anonymous), “The Essence of Christianity in Relation to The Ego and Its
Own,” trans. Frederick M. Gordon, http://www.lsr-projekt.de/poly/enfeuerbach.html.
18 Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, ed. with an introduction by Gary Saul Morson, trans.
and annotated by Kenneth Lantz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009),
1:735–36.
19 Jackson, Dialogues with Dostoevsky, 294.
20 Dostoevsky, Writer’s Diary, 1:736.

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 “If there’s no immortality of the soul, . . . everything is lawful” 173

as a guide to action, he finds Ivan’s proposition limited, dogmatic, and

dangerous.”21
Indeed, Dostoevsky approaches the issue of interdependence of virtue and
faith in a radically different way than Ivan Karamazov:

Ivan insists that love and virtue can come to one only through faith. Zosima,
however, believes that belief in God and faith are inseparable from love. “Try
to love your neighbors actively and ceaselessly,” Zosima counsels Mrs. Khokla-
kova. “To the extent that you succeed in love, you will become convinced in
the existence of God and in the immortality of your soul. But if you reach the
point of total self-renunciation in love for your neighbor, then without ques-
tion you will believe, and no doubt will be able to enter your soul.”22

Zosima’s idea of active love seems to be close to Dostoevsky’s own view of

Orthodox Christianity.
Ivan’s starting point is the same as Dostoevsky’s. Ivan is also convinced of a
firm interdependence of faith in God, the immortality of the soul, and morality.
Yet, unlike Dostoevsky, Ivan ends up proclaiming immoralism. Dostoevsky
appears to see clearly that Stirner’s idea of “ego” and “self-enjoyment,” which make
everything permitted, is just a logical consequence of Feuerbach’s philosophy.
And Ivan’s problem is perhaps an excessive logic, that is, rationalism; a lack of
any emotional attitude; and, most of all, a lack of love for other people.
Jackson’s statement that Dostoevsky’s response to Ivan is to remind him
that it is “not virtue through faith but faith through love”23 seems to me abso-
lutely well founded. “Faith which comes through love”—that is certainly true.
And, according to Dostoevsky, virtue is achieved through one’s love for other
people. The “active love” advocated by Zosima turns out to be a recipe both for
faith in immortality (not in immortality in general, but in the immortality of
one’s soul) and at the same time for moral action. Alyosha’s kiss, and Christ’s
kiss in Ivan’s poem, presents a symbolic image of such forgiving love.
It may seem, however, that Dostoevsky suggests coming back from Stirner
to Feuerbach, who also regarded love as a significant factor. But, according to
Feuerbach, “love is practical atheism, the negation of God by the heart, by the

21 Jackson, Dialogues with Dostoevsky, 294.

22 Ibid., 300.
23 Ibid., 294.

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174 Sergei A. Kibalnik

feelings, in fact.”24 Proclaiming himself a “communist,” Feuerbach meant “love”

as “love for humanity.” In the meantime, this principle of “love for mankind”
was the target of keen criticism by Dostoevsky, both in his novels and in his
journalism.
In “Unsubstantiated Statements,” Dostoevsky declares,

Love for humanity is even entirely unthinkable, uncomprehensible and

utterly impossible without faith in the immortality of the human soul to go along
with it. Those people who deprived humanity of its faith in its own immor-
tality want to replace that faith, in the sense of the meaning of the highest
purpose of existence, by “love for humanity.” Those people, I say, are raising
their hands against themselves; for in place of love for humanity they plant
in the heart of a one who lost his faith the seed of hatred for humanity. Let all
those wise men of cast-iron convictions shrug their shoulders at this state-
ment of mine. But this thought is wiser than their wisdom, and I believe
without a doubt that it will someday become an axiom for humanity.25

By “those people” Dostoevsky here apparently means Feuerbach and his

followers.
In Brothers Karamazov, the confession of a doctor, retold by Zosima, has a
similar meaning, compromising Feuerbach’s ideal of love for mankind:

“I love humanity,” he said, “but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity
in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams,” he said, “I have
often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and
perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly neces-
sary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two
days together, as I know by experience.” (PSS, 14:53)

Ivan Karamazov says that his Grand Inquisitor has been “loving . . . mankind”
“all [his] life” (PSS, 14:238).
At the end of the novel, Kolya Krasotkin asks Alyosha Karamazov: “It’s
possible for one who doesn’t believe in God to love mankind, don’t you think
so? Voltaire didn’t believe in God and loved mankind?’ (‘I am at it again,’ he
thought to himself.)” Alyosha answers: “Voltaire believed in God, though not
very much, I think, and I don’t think he loved mankind very much either.” The
narrator’s comment on how Alyosha said this is quite remarkable—“quietly,

24 Feuerbach (anonymous), “The Essence of Christianity in Relation to The Ego and Its Own.”
25 Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, 1:736.

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 “If there’s no immortality of the soul, . . . everything is lawful” 175

gently, and quite naturally, as though he were talking to someone of his own age,
or even older. Kolya was particularly struck by Alyosha’s apparent diffidence
about his opinion of Voltaire. He seemed to be leaving the question for him,
little Kolya, to settle” (PSS, 14:500). This comment is in a way analogous to the
title of Dostoevsky’s article “Unsubstantiated Statements,” fairly commented on by
Jackson. Alyosha’s “diffidence” reminds us of Dostoevsky’s proclaiming his own
assertions as “arbitrary.” Both words are aimed at eliminating any pattern of
dogma, which was always alien to the writer. Dostoevsky’s manifestations of
faith were always styled in such a way, both in his literary works and in the Diary
of a Writer. Without sharing Stirner’s anarchical individualism, Dostoevsky
advocates coming back to the “immortality of the soul,” which was rejected by
Feuerbach.
Ivan’s discourse on “if there is no God . . .” clearly fits this pattern. “I don’t
know whether or not it has been sufficiently pointed out that [Ivan’s formula] is
not an outburst of relief or of joy, but rather a bitter acknowledgment of a fact,”
asked Albert Camus, who continued, “The certainty of a God giving a meaning
to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity.
The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice, and that is where
the bitterness comes in.”26 No wonder Jean-Paul Sartre turned Ivan’s statement
upside down. And the essence of existentialism was formulated by Sartre in the
following way: “Nothing will be changed if God does not exist . . . even if God
existed that would make no difference from its point of view. Not that we
believe God does exist, but we think that the real problem is not that of His
existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that
nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of
God.”27 Ivan Karamazov’s idea, which according to Camus is partly Dostoevsky’s
one, was regarded by Sartre as the starting point of existentialism.
In this respect, both European and Russian existentialism seem to follow
Feuerbach and many other partisans of the Pelagian tradition in European
philosophy rather than Dostoevsky. But as Jackson has shown, according to

26 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (1955), 44,
http://www.dhspriory.org/kenny/PhilTexts/Camus/Myth%20of%20Sisyphus-.pdf.
27 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” in Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre,
ed. Walter Kaufman, trans. Philip Mairet (Meridian, 1989), https://www.marxists.org/
reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm.

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176 Sergei A. Kibalnik

Dostoevsky the primary force is love—“not virtue through faith but faith
through love—this is Dostoevsky’s reply to Ivan.”28 So one can say that Sartre
followed Zosima rather than Ivan Karamazov. And thus he still followed
Dostoevsky.
As we can see, the “voices” of Dostoevsky’s characters are to a certain
extent associated with the ideas of European philosophers of the mid-nine-
teenth century. And the twentieth- century European and Russian
philosophers—Nietzsche and Camus, Semion Frank and Sergei Bulgakov—
clearly found their philosophical frameworks in Dostoevsky’s novels.
The complicated dialectics of faith and morality, disbelief and Man-
godhood, love for one’s neighbor and love for mankind in Brothers Karamazov
cannot be understood without taking into account their interdependence with
contemporaneous philosophical discourses.

28 Jackson, Dialogues with Dostoevsky, 302.

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