569 book page, Chapter 9 — The Devil. Ivan’s Nightmare
I repeat again that I would give away all this superstellar life, all the ranks and honours, simply to be transformed into the soul of a merchant’s wife weighing eighteen stone and set candles at God’s shrine.»
«Then even you don’t believe in God?» said Ivan, with a smile of hatred. «What can I say?- that is, if you are in earnest-«
«Is there a God or not?» Ivan cried with the same savage intensity.
«Ah, then you are in earnest! My dear fellow, upon my word I don’t know. There! I’ve said it now!»
«You don’t know, but you see God? No, you are not someone apart, you are myself, you are I and nothing more! You are rubbish, you are my fancy!»
«Well, if you like, I have the same philosophy as you, that would be true. Je pense, donc je suis,* I know that for a fact; all the rest, all these worlds, God and even Satan- all that is not proved, to my mind. Does all that exist of itself, or is it only an emanation of myself, a logical development of my ego which alone has existed for ever: but I make haste to stop, for I believe you will be jumping up to beat me directly.»
570 book page, Chapter 9 — The Devil. Ivan’s Nightmare
«And what tortures have you in the other world besides the quadrillion kilometres?» asked Ivan, with a strange eagerness.
«What tortures? Ah, don’t ask. In old days we had all sorts, but now they have taken chiefly to moral punishments- ‘the stings of conscience’ and all that nonsense. We got that, too, from you, from the softening of your manners. And who’s the better for it? Only those who have got no conscience, for how can they be tortured by conscience when they have none? But decent people who have conscience and a sense of honour suffer for it. Reforms, when the ground has not been prepared for them, especially if they are institutions copied from abroad, do nothing but mischief! The ancient fire was better. Well, this man, who was condemned to the quadrillion kilometres, stood still, looked round and lay down across the road. ‘I won’t go, I refuse on principle!’ Take the soul of an enlightened Russian atheist and mix it with the soul of the prophet Jonah, who sulked for three days and nights in the belly of the whale, and you get the character of that thinker who lay across the road.»
«What did he lie on there?»
«Well, I suppose there was something to lie on. You are not laughing?»
«Bravo!» cried Ivan, still with the same strange eagerness. Now he was listening with an unexpected curiosity. «Well, is he lying there now?»
«That’s the point, that he isn’t. He lay there almost a thousand years and then he got up and went on.»
«What an ass!» cried Ivan, laughing nervously and still seeming to be pondering some-thing intently. «Does it make any difference whether he lies there for ever or walks the quadrillion kilometres? It would take a billion years to walk it?»
«Much more than that. I haven’t got a pencil and paper or I could work it out. But he got there long ago, and that’s where the story begins.»
«What, he got there? But how did he get the billion years to do it?»
«Why, you keep thinking of our present earth! But our present earth may have been repeated a billion times. Why, it’s become extinct, been frozen; cracked, broken to bits, disintegrated into its elements, again ‘the water above the firmament,’ then again a comet, again a sun, again from the sun it becomes earth- and the same sequence may have been repeated endlessly and exactly the same to every detail, most unseemly and insufferably te-dious-«
«Well, well, what happened when he arrived?»
«Why, the moment the gates of Paradise were open and he walked in; before he had been there two seconds, by his watch (though to my thinking his watch must have long dissolved into its elements on the way), he cried out that those two seconds were worth walking not a quadrillion kilometres but a quadrillion of quadrillions, raised to the quadril-lionth power! In fact, he sang ‘hosannah’ and overdid it so, that some persons there of lofty ideas wouldn’t shake hands with him at first- he’d become too rapidly reactionary, they said.
571 book page, Chapter 9 — The Devil. Ivan’s Nightmare
The Russian temperament. I repeat, it’s a legend. I give it for what it’s worth, so that’s the sort of ideas we have on such subjects even now.»
«I’ve caught you!» Ivan cried, with an almost childish delight, as though he had succeeded in remembering something at last. «That anecdote about the quadrillion years, I made up myself! I was seventeen then, I was at the high school. I made up that anecdote and told it to a schoolfellow called Korovkin, it was at Moscow…. The anecdote is so characteristic that I couldn’t have taken it from anywhere. I thought I’d forgotten it… but I’ve unconsciously recalled it- I recalled it myself- it was not you telling it! Thousands of things are unconsciously remembered like that even when people are being taken to execution… it’s come back to me in a dream. You are that dream! You are a dream, not a living creature!»
«From the vehemence with which you deny my existence,» laughed the gentleman, «I am convinced that you believe in me.»
«Not in the slightest! I haven’t a hundredth part of a grain of faith in you!»
«But you have the thousandth of a grain. Homeopathic doses perhaps are the strongest. Confess that you have faith even to the ten-thousandth of a grain.»
«Not for one minute,» cried Ivan furiously. «But I should like to believe in you,» he added strangely.
«Aha! There’s an admission! But I am good-natured. I’ll come to your assistance again. Listen, it was I caught you, not you me. I told you your anecdote you’d forgotten, on purpose, so as to destroy your faith in me completely.»
«You are lying. The object of your visit is to convince me of your existence!»
«Just so. But hesitation, suspense, conflict between belief and disbelief- is sometimes such torture to a conscientious man, such as you are, that it’s better to hang oneself at once. Knowing that you are inclined to believe in me, I administered some disbelief by telling you that anecdote. I lead you to belief and disbelief by turns, and I have my motive in it. It’s the new method. As soon as you disbelieve in me completely, you’ll begin assuring me to my face that I am not a dream but a