I will now turn my attention to the character of Ivan. Alyosha is the character that I most want to be like, and I am sometimes able to identify with Dmitri. But I believe that most of the people who know me would say that I am most like Ivan. For this reason I feel that I must say at least something about him.
Ivan was the second child of Fyodor Karamazov, and the first child of his second wife. Ivan was abandoned by his father upon the death of his mother, and went with Alyosha to live with Yefim Polenov. But Ivan was very sensitive to the fact that he was not living at home and living on other people’s charity. He left home at the age of thirteen and went to a Moscow boarding school. When he finished there he went to the university, where he was very poor for the first two years. He managed to scrape by as a tutor and a writer for the local newspaper. He went on to write brilliant book reviews. Then, in his final year, he wrote an article about the ecclesiastical courts that got him national attention. At first this article was highly praised, but it was eventually found to be nothing more than satirical burlesque.
Ivan was a brilliant student and an atheist. He was a very reserved, morose, and serious-minded person. (In that respect I guess a lot of people would say that I am like him.)
Ivan hated his father. We start to see this at the very beginning. During Ivan’s first two years in college, when he was in desperate straits financially, he did not attempt to contact his father–not even to ask for money. Dostoyevsky says that this was “perhaps from pride, perhaps from contempt for him, or perhaps from his cool common sense, which told him that from such a father he would get no assistance.”
At the beginning of the story, when Fyodor Karamazov and Dmitri went to meet with Father Zossima, Ivan was along for the ride. Alyosha believed–correctly–that Ivan had enough influence over his father to keep him from making a scene at the monastery, and he hoped that Ivan would exercise this influence. But Ivan did nothing to restrain his father the whole time that he was at the monastery. Ivan did nothing until the very end, as they were driving away in their carriage, when he said, “You’ve talked enough. You might rest a bit now.” I believe that Ivan did this because he disliked his father so much that he wanted to let him make a buffoon out of himself and not do anything to stop him.
Ivan’s dislike for his father came to a head at the murder. Ivan’s atheism led him to the view that if there is no God, then anything is lawful. This provided Smerdyakov with the moral justification for the murder. He made no secret of these views when he, Fyodor, Gregory, and Smerdyakov would discuss religion over brandy after dinner. Smerdyakov was an eager student; he respected Ivan very much and wanted to show Ivan that he was worthy of his attention. Eventually Ivan returned to Moscow, in a move deliberately calculated to leave Fyodor to his fate by providing Smerdyakov with ample opportunity to commit the murder.
And yet, Ivan is referred to frequently throughout the story as being the one who was most like his father. Interesting.
In summary, Ivan is a brilliant, reserved atheist who writes theological articles as a joke. Does this describe me? I believe that most of the people who know me well would say that I am both brilliant and reserved, just like Ivan. Read the rest of the material on this blog, and see if you would agree with that assessment. But am I an atheist who writes theological articles as a joke? Maybe. If you’ve been tracking with me on this blog you’ve seen me express some pretty stiff doubts about God. And yet I still write about issues within evangelical Protestant-dom that are of concern to me, as if I were actually one of them. I may be quite a bit like Ivan after all.
