Through indifference he accepts letting his suicide be used to the advantage of a cause he despises. “I decided last night that I didn’t care.” And finally he prepares his deed with a mixed feeling of revolt and freedom. “I shall kill myself in order to assert my insubordination, my new and dreadful liberty.” It is no longer a question of revenge, but of revolt. Kirilov is consequently an absurd character—yet with this essential reservation: he kills himself. But he himself explains this contradiction, and in such a way that at the same time he reveals the absurd secret in all its purity. In truth, he adds to his fatal logic an extraordinary ambition which gives the character its full perspective: he wants to kill himself to become god.
The reasoning is classic in its clarity.
If God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is absurd, but it is what is needed. The interesting thing, however, is to give a meaning to that divinity brought to earth. That amounts to clarifying the premise: “If God does not exist, I am god,” which still remains rather obscure. It is important to note at the outset that the man who flaunts that mad claim is indeed of this world.
He performs his gymnastics every morning to preserve his health. He is stirred by the joy of Chatov recovering his wife. On a sheet of paper to be found after his death he wants to draw a face sticking out his tongue at “them.” He is childish and irascible, passionate, methodical, and sensitive. Of the superman he has nothing but the logic and the obsession, whereas of man he has the whole catalogue. Yet it is he who speaks calmly of his divinity. He is not mad, or else Dostoevsky is. Consequently it is not a megalomaniac’s illusion that excites him. And taking the words in their specific sense would, in this instance, be ridiculous.
Kirilov himself helps us to understand. In reply to a question from Stavrogin, he makes clear that he is not talking of a god-man. It might be thought that this springs from concern to distinguish himself from Christ. But in reality it is a matter of annexing Christ. Kirilov in fact fancies for a moment that Jesus at his death did not find himself in Paradise. He found out then that his torture had been useless. “The laws of nature,” says the engineer, “made Christ live in the midst of falsehood and die for a falsehood.” Solely in this sense Jesus indeed personifies the whole human drama. He is the complete man, being the one who realized the most absurd condition. He is not the God-man but the man-god. And, like him, each of us can be crucified and victimized—and is to a certain degree.
The divinity in question is therefore altogether terrestrial. “For three years,” says Kirilov, “I sought the attribute of my divinity and I have found it. The attribute of my divinity is independence.” Now can be seen the meaning of Kirilov’s premise: “If God does not exist, I am god.” To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not to serve an immortal being. Above all, of course, it is drawing all the inferences from that painful independence.
If God exists, all depends on him and we can do nothing against his will. If he does not exist, everything depends on us. For Kirilov, as for Nietzsche, to kill God is to become god oneself; it is to realize on this earth the eternal life of which the Gospel speaks.[21] But if this metaphysical crime is enough for man’s fulfillment, why add suicide? Why kill oneself and leave this world after having won freedom? That is contradictory. Kirilov is well aware of this, for he adds: “If you feel that, you are a tsar and, far from killing yourself, you will live covered with glory.” But men in general do not know it. They do not feel “that.”
As in the time of Prometheus, they entertain blind hopes.[22] They need to be shown the way and cannot do without preaching. Consequently, Kirilov must kill himself out of love for humanity. He must show his brothers a royal and difficult path on which he will be the first. It is a pedagogical suicide. Kirilov sacrifices himself, then. But if he is crucified, he will not be victimized. He remains the man-god, convinced of a death without future, imbued with evangelical melancholy. “I,” he says, “am unhappy because I am obliged to assert my freedom.”
But once he is dead and men are at last enlightened, this earth will be peopled with tsars and lighted up with human glory. Kirilov’s pistol shot will be the signal for the last revolution. Thus, it is not despair that urges him to death, but love of his neighbor for his own sake. Before terminating in blood an indescribable spiritual adventure, Kirilov makes a remark as old as human suffering: “All is well.”
This theme of suicide in Dostoevsky, then, is indeed an absurd theme. Let us merely note before going on that Kirilov reappears in other characters who themselves set in motion additional absurd themes. Stavrogin and Ivan Karamazov try out the absurd truths in practical life. They are the ones liberated by Kirilov’s death. They try their skill at being tsars. Stavrogin leads an “ironic” life, and it is well known in what regard. He arouses hatred around him.
And yet the key to the character is found in his farewell letter: “I have not been able to detest anything.” He is a tsar in indifference. Ivan is likewise by refusing to surrender the royal powers of the mind. To those who, like his brother, prove by their lives that it is essential to humiliate oneself in order to believe, he might reply that the condition is shameful. His key word is: “Everything is permitted,” with the appropriate shade of melancholy. Of course, like Nietzsche, the most famous of God’s assassins, he ends in madness. But this is a risk worth running, and, faced with such tragic ends, the essential impulse of the absurd mind is to ask: “What does that prove?”
* * *
Thus the novels, like the Diary, propound the absurd question. They establish logic unto death, exaltation, “dreadful” freedom, the glory of the tsars become human. All is well, everything is permitted, and nothing is hateful—these are absurd judgments. But what an amazing creation in which those creatures of fire and ice seem so familiar to us. The passionate world of indifference that rumbles in their hearts does not seem at all monstrous to us. We recognize in it our everyday anxieties. And probably no one so much as Dostoevsky has managed to give the absurd world such familiar and tormenting charms.
Yet what is his conclusion? Two quotations will show the complete metaphysical reversal that leads the writer to other revelations. The argument of the one who commits logical suicide having provoked protests from the critics, Dostoevsky in the following installments of the Diary amplifies his position and concludes thus: “If faith in immortality is so necessary to the human being (that without it he comes to the point of killing himself), it must therefore be the normal state of humanity.
Since this is the case, the immortality of the human soul exists without any doubt.” Then again in the last pages of his last novel, at the conclusion of that gigantic combat with God, some children ask Aliocha: “Karamazov, is it true what religion says, that we shall rise from the dead, that we shall see one another again?” And Aliocha answers: “Certainly, we shall see one another again, we shall joyfully tell one another everything that has happened.’’
Thus Kirilov, Stavrogin, and Ivan are defeated. The Brothers Karamazov replies to The Possessed. And it is indeed a conclusion. Aliocha’s case is not ambiguous, as is that of Prince Muichkin. Ill, the latter lives in a perpetual present, tinged with smiles and indifference, and that blissful state might be the eternal life of which the Prince speaks. On the contrary, Aliocha clearly says: “We shall meet again.” There is no longer any question of suicide and of madness. What is the use, for anyone who is sure of immortality and of its joys? Man exchanges his divinity for happiness. “We shall joyfully tell one another everything that has happened.” Thus again Kirilov’s pistol rang out somewhere in Russia, but the world continued to cherish its blind hopes. Men did not understand “that.”
Consequently, it is not an absurd novelist addressing us, but an existential novelist. Here, too, the leap is touching and gives its nobility to the art that inspires it. It is a stirring acquiescence, riddled with doubts, uncertain and ardent. Speaking of The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky wrote: “The chief question that will be pursued throughout this book is the very one from which I have suffered consciously or unconsciously all life long: the existence of God.” It is hard to believe that a novel sufficed to transform into joyful certainty the suffering of a lifetime.
One commentator[23] correctly pointed out that Dostoevsky is on Ivan’s side and that the affirmative chapters took three months of effort whereas what he called
