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POETIC TRANSFORMATIONS OF SCIENTIFIC FACTS IN BRAT'JA KARAMAZOVY

Diane E. Oenning Thompson, University of Cambridge

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century the scientific revolution was gaining relentless momentum and ever more adherents. Thanks to increasing refinements in experimental techniques, many original scientific ideas were triumphantly vindicated and became established as facts. In intellectual quarters some greeted the new scientific discoveries with lively interest and enthusiasm, others with profound consternation and a wish to deny their validity, or to limit the scope of their applicability. For all apprehended the radical implications of the new scientific world view for the cultural tradition, and especially for religion. Given Dostoevsky's fascination with ideas, his uncanny faculty for sensing new trends and his anxiety for Russia's future, this burgeoning scientific activity could not, and did not, escape his omnivorous attention. Nor could he ignore the challenge which the unprecedented growth of science presented to his most cherished ideals. Indeed, during the last decade of his life, references to science become more frequent in his extra literary writings. They also begin to enter his fiction.

In Brat'ja Karamazovy, more than in any other work by Dostoevsky, one senses the growing scientific world view pressing in on the world of the novel. Science has penetrated the consciousness of his heroes and consequently has entered the novel's ideological dialogues. Perhaps this presence of a scientific dimension, absent in earlier classics, accounts in part for our perception of Dostoevsky's modernity. Brat'ja Karamazovy reflects Dostoevsky's profound apprehension about the implications of the scientific world view for human destiny which, for him, was bound to the fate of his Christian ideal.

Dostoevsky's engagement in his last novel with the ideological issues raised by the emergence of modem science suggests a rhetorical program, and various rhetorical arguments are represented and deployed. The novel, though, is not simply a forum for rhetoric and publicistic polemics or apologetics. As Bakhtin insists, Dostoevsky was first and foremost an artist, and in Brat'ja Karamazovy he confronts the challenge through his art. Entering his novel, extra-literary elements, such as scientific facts, become variously transformed. In Bakhtin's terms, Dostoevsky "reaccents" a word, that is, he highlights it and subjects it to re-evaluations by passing it through those new voices and contexts he creates.(1) In this way he expands its ideational referents and consequently its semantic resonance. This process is vividly displayed in Brat'ja Karamazovy where, tracing the term nauka through the voices of the narrator and the ideological heroes, we emerge with a word which has gathered loaded meanings.(2) Discourses touching on science usually include appeals to various scientific facts or recent discoveries. Since all scientific facts are refracted through the image of a speaking person, they become images of scientific facts and consequently, something more. For in the novel a person's word on science involves not only his cognitive faculties, but simultaneously conveys his emotional response so that scientific facts become charged with values and expressive force. As components of a person's world view, they interact with his beliefs and intentions and thus become bound up with human fates.

Scientific findings arc usually conveyed in prose devoid of poetic devices since the goal is practical communication. The novel, though, is not a purely prosaic genre. While literary prose combines the referential and poetic functions of language, it inclines more markedly towards the poetic, which Jakobson defines as the focus on the message for its own sake.(3) Such a focus entails recourse to the traditional devices of poetry. Among the major poetic modes Dostoevsky employs are metaphor, metonymy and symbol. Though differing in important respects, all share radical processes of transference by which what is said becomes something more, or something else. And these figurative accumulations of surplus meanings map the domain of poetics. By virtue of those associative relations of similarity, contrast and contiguity which the artist selects, and those contexts he creates, objective referents become invested with new meanings and values for whose sake he may have written his work. Asking how scientific ideas arc represented in Brat'ja Karamazovy is tantamount to tracing how they become constituents of a person's image, and of a metaphor, metonymy or symbol.

Then, there are the larger poetic structures of parallel patterning and prefiguration which link large textual segments in subtle semantic and figurative networks. Most distinctive is prefiguration which, I believe, lies at the heart of the poetics of Brat'ja Karamazovy. Examining how mold's built on scientific allusions arc carried through Brat'ja Karamazovy, we may discover how they acquire transcendental meanings and become critical constituents of the novel's eschatological dialogue.

The narrator broaches the theme of science very early in Book One where he remarks that the brilliant brother Ivan had just published a "strange article" on a subject (the ecclesiastical court) which should be unfamiliar to him "potomu čto končil on kurs estestvennikom" (XIV,16).(4) Shortly thereafter, he supplies the reader with the interpretive clue when he confides that Ivan's article was "liš derzkij fars i nasmeška" (XIV,16). In these ways he draws our attention to the rift between natural science and religion and simultaneously conveys a disquieting ambiguity about Ivan's intellectual activities.

The narrator introduces the term nauka into an unexpected context where, significantly, he associates it with Alyosha. Justifying his hero's choice of the monastic path, he affirms that Alyosha shared the general longing of contemporary youth for truth, its eagerness for a "podvig", and its readiness for self-sacrifice. However, he explains, few understand that in order to serve the truth effectively, one must sacrifice five or six years of one's youth "na trudnoe, tjažëloe učenie, na nauku" (XIV.25). This gives rise to the expectation that Alyosha is one of the "few", and to the question which "study", which "science" has he chosen. The narrator then introduces a fundamental bifurcation. Two roads lay before youth: either the exceptional path of faith chosen by his hero, or the path of socialism and atheism. At this point he makes way for Alyosha's direct utterance: "Xoču žit' dlja bessmertija, i polovinnogo kompromissa ne prinimaju" (XIV,25). And no other roads are offered, there is no middle way in this novel's artistic system. This fundamental dichotomy between faith and atheism determines the poetic representation and structure of the whole novel.

Which road has Ivan chosen? The answer soon follows when we learn that Alyosha has been longing to draw closer to his older brother but, bewildered by Ivan's aloofness, he wonders "no bylo li tut kakogo-nibud' prezrenija k nemu, k glupen'komu poslušniku, ot učënogo ateista. On soveršenno znal, čto brat ego ateist" (XIV.54). Thus two key ideological terms, natural science and atheism, are joined in the image of the clever natural scientist who reveals some very equivocal, not to say ominous traits.

Next to utter nauka is Zosima, the main spokesman for the author's Christian ideal, who now indirectly identifies Alyosha's "science". Zosima counsels that one gains faith in God and immortality through striving to love one's neighbors "actively and persistently", through what he calls "active love", a key idea of the novel: "Ljubov' že dejatel'naja - eto rabota i vyderžka, a dlja inyx, požaluj, celaja nauka" (XIV,54). With this extraordinary definition, Zosima conjoins the sacred and the secular, for "active love", as Linnér remarks, is a "theological concept". Yet one achieves mastery of this "whole science" in much the same way as of a secular science, by "work", "tenacity" and, in Linnér's words, by the steady striving "towards the attainment of a goal".(5) Conversely, "science", implanted in a theological context, becomes potentially invested with the attributes of Christian love and morality. The author's rhetorical aim in making the practice of Christian love a "whole science" is to win for Christianity the authority and allegiance accorded to science by the rising generation. The setting of Zosima's ministry to suffering people in which he expounds the "whole science" of "active love" is itself a mimesis of this idea. Thus Dostoevsky brings Christian love down to modern earth where its practice can beneficently influence human affairs and, he hoped, the course of history. And this wish to surmount the challenge of science by revealing new directions for faith is clearly spelled out in the Notes where we find writ large: "Togda ne poboimsja i nauki, puti daže novye i nei ukažem" (XV,250-51).

But where does this leave our usual conception of science?(6) Again Dostocvsky gives the word to a man of faith, Father Paisy, who shortly takes up the theme of secular science in a discourse which is a generative paradigm for the great ideological struggles ahead.

The moment Paisy speaks there is a sharp stylistic shift to biblical kerygma which perfectly accords with the resonant urgency and hagiographical function of his word. Paisy's discourse is shaped by two poetic structures; a central metaphorical opposition of whole versus pans, and prefiguration, by which I mean those prophecies which are later fulfilled in the text.

Father Paisy begins:

Pomni, junyj, neustanno,...čto mirskaja nauka, soedinivšiš' v velikuju silu razobrala, v poslednyi vek osobenno, vsë, cto zaveščano v knigax svjatyx nam nebesnogo, i posle žestokogo analiza učënyx mira sego ne ostalos' iz prežnei svjatyni rešitel'no ničego (XIV.155).

Paisy presents secular science as a powerful force whose practitioners are not simply analyzing, but cruelly annihilating the sacred testament to "absolutely nothing" (rešitel'no ničego). Thus he conveys a sense of pervasive, willful evil relentlessly at work in the world. But the phrase "the scientists of this world" implies that there are other worlds, and that these scientists arc confined to the parts, to the narrower compass of this world. Paisy's hint at something beyond the scientists' horizon is later fulfilled in word and image, in Zosima's discourse on our living bond with "other higher worlds" and in Alyosha's mystical vision.

Father Paisy expands his metaphor:

No razbirali oni po častjam, a celoe prosmotreli, i daže udivlenija dostojno do kakoj slepoty. Togda kak celoe stoit pred ix že glazami nezyblemo, kak i prežde, i vrata adovy ne odolejut ego (XIV, 155-56).

Nowhere else is one of the novel's central metaphorical oppositions - parts versus whole - so sharply and passionately marked. The "whole", as Børtnes remarks, "is a synonym for Christ, a metonymy that corresponds to the remark in Dostoevsky's notebook that 'Christ is the source of all': 'istočnik vsego - Xristos'".(7) Paisy's attack rests on the idea of blindness, and an assertion of divine, invincible omnipresence. It echoes those biblical passages where mocking unbelievers fail to see the one divine truth because they are spiritually blind. The choice of biblical quotation prefigures those "gates of hell" in the novel trying to prevail against the divine whole.

But if there are the "gales of hell", there are also the "doors of paradise", and later in the novel they too are variously invoked. Those familiar with the last phrase from Matthew 16.18 will recall the famous preceding lines - "Skažu i Ja tebe: ty Pëtr', i na sëm kamne Ja sozdam cerkov' Moju," - and may subsequently see Paisy's allusion to the biblical verse as a subtle prefiguration of Alyosha's speech by the stone to the twelve boys which marks the beginning of his ministry to found his new church, to form a revitalized Christian brotherhood.(8)

Paisy, now merging scientists with atheists, utters the fundamental prophecy of the novel:

Daže v dviženijax tex že samyx, vsë razrušivšix ateistov živët ono kak prcžde nezyblemo! Ibo i otrckšiesja ot xristianstva i buntujuščie protiv nego v suščestve svoem sami togo že samogo Xristova oblika sut', takovymi že i ostalis', ibo do six por ni mudrost' ix, ni žar serdca ix ne v silax byli sozdat' inogo vyšego obraza čeloveku i dostojnstvu ego, kak obraz, ukazannyj drevle Xristom. A čto bylo popitok, to vyxodili odni liš' urodlivosti (XIV, 156)

Paisy prophesies the inevitable defeat of the annihilators because his metaphorical definition of a human being and Christ's image precludes their separation. Paisy's insistence on the term "image" is telling. Christ's deeds, His thoughts and teachings, are not singled out for mention. Christ as ikon is the authentic representation of Him in this novel. The destroying atheists' substitutions of this icon are also expressed in (he pictorial term "deformities". Here we have a fine anticipation of Ivan's strange gait (idët kak-to raskačivajas') with his shorter right leg, and of his warped "golden age" vision in which secular science promotes the ascendancy of the man-god, and which that ultimate deformity, the nightmare devil, quotes back at him as his final taunt.

Paisy, after warning Alyosha, the future hero-saint, against the "severe temptations" of the world he is soon to enter, concludes: "Nu, teper' stupaj, sirota!". Fyodor, though, is still alive; his imminent death can hardly be in Palsy's mind. But Zosima, Alyosha's spiritual father, is dying. For Paisy this means lhal ihe elder is, so to speak, Alyosha's true father on earth. Here we sec a detaching of Alyosha from blood bonds and a joining of him to spiritual ones, a traditional hagiographical topos. The saint engaged in mortal combat with the devil against worldly temptations is a constant of hagiography. Only now, in the late nineteenth century, the ancient antagonist has found a new residence in the atheist adherents of secular science. Palsy's love for Alyosha, the pathos of Alyosha's imminent orphanhood, and the ominous context of lurking tragedy lift Paisy's word from the merely pious, edificatory to the drama of a life and death struggle being played out simultaneously in the novel and in history. Alyosha is shortly to face the temptations of the rebellious, atheistic intellect when he meets Ivan, the natural scientist who sees only parts, who attempts to strip Christ of His divine nature. Paisy's warning proves prophetic, a prefiguration of the intellectual activities of Ivan, Rakitin and the devil.

The metaphor of parts versus the whole, then, resolves into two sets of oppositional terms: to "parts" belong the notions temporal power, this world, annihilation, nothingness, blindness, absence, transience, atheists, rebellion, deformities, hell; to the "whole" belong bequeathal, the sacred, other worlds, the Bible, image, vision, presence, human dignity, eternal, Christ. The distribution of these antithetical ideas is maintained throughout the novel on the two axes of its fundamental opposition, faith and atheism. These binary oppositions are not randomly thrown together but are brought into dialogic relations of contiguity, similarity and contrast so that they form a artistic system which is hierarchically ordered, thanks to the plot and the poetic power of traditional symbols. The prefigurative pattern outlined here points to the subsequent development of these oppositions as they dramatically unfold in passages bearing scientific motifs, among others.

The mathematician Lars Gårding writes: "The discovery of non-Euclidean geometry was a psychological breakthrough. Euclidean geometry was no longer identical with Reality; there were other models ... the non-Euclidean plane was a new world".(9) Ivan introduces this major mathematical discovery into an eschatological dialogue with Alyosha, a context which necessarily refracts its referential status, forcing it to acquire metaphysical meanings. At the same time Ivan's appeal to non-Euclidean geometry becomes involved with his intentions, which so far are disturbingly obscure, and "double-voiced". In an artistic work, whenever one thing is said but another is meant, we may have to expose a sophistical discourse, reverse an ironic inversion or interpret a metaphor, or symbol. All apply to Ivan's word. Let us turn to his argument.

After telling Alyosha "I dejstvitel'no, čelovek vydumal Boga", Ivan suddenly performs a volte face saying that he accepts God "prjamo i prosto" (XIV,214). He also asserts that he will "avoid all hypotheses", and yet he encloses the question of God's existence within the standard hypothetical construction of "if..., then...":

esli Bog est' i esli on dejstvitel'no sozdal zemlju, to, kak nam soveršenno izvestno, sozdal on eë po èvklidovoj geometrii, a um čelovečeskij s ponjatiem liš' o trëx izmerenijax prostranstva (XIV.214).

Here Ivan assumes that God exists only in order to point out the absurdities to which this assumption must lead. Ivan also says he wishes to eschew axioms, but seconds later he takes it as axiomatic that the earth and the human mind are modeled on three-dimensional Euclidean geometry. The dominant note here is intellectual ambiguity, if not duplicity.

Now, Ivan continues, there arc "geometers" and "philosophers":

kotorye somnevajutsja v tom, čtoby vsja vselennaja, ili eščë obširnee, - vsë bytie bylo sozdano liš' po èvklidovoj geometrii, osmelivajutsja daže mečtat' čtto dve parallel 'nyc linii, kotorye po Èvklidu ni za čto mogut sojti's' na zemle, možet byt', i sošlis' by gde-nibud' v beskonečnosti (XIV;214).

If Ivan believes these "most remarkable" geometers and philosophers - and he gives no sign of disbelieving them - then he has already contradicted himself. There is another logical slippage here, for Ivan conveniently overlooks the fad lhat it was precisely human beings with earthly Euclidean minds who had these insights into non-Euclidean planes, thus demonstrating that people are capable of conceptualizing more than three dimensions. It now becomes clear that Ivan uses non-Euclidean geometry to minify the human mind. Recalling Paisy's central metaphor, to diminish a human being is necessarily to diminish God. This is just what Ivan does in his next non sequitur:

Ja, golubčtik, rešil tak, čto esli ja daže etogo ne mogu ponjat', to gde ž mne pro Boga ponjat'. Ja smirenno soznajus', čto u menja net nikakix sposobnostej razrešat' takie voprosy, u menja um èvklidovskij, zemnoj, a potomu gde nam rešat' o tom, čto ne ot mira cego (XIV.214).

Covertly lumping God with non-Euclidean geometry, Ivan, in his overweening pride, takes his own intellect as the measure, as though his incomprehension of God and non-Euclidean geometry were equivalent. Reducing God to the level of his intellect, he deprives God, as Terras says, of any "mystic extension".(10) One suspects that Ivan invokes the rigorous authority of mathematics in order to give a specious sense of proof to his argument that God is no more than a hypothetical construct. But there is more to Ivan's discourse than a logically flawed argument.

Aristotle said that "from metaphor we can best get hold of something fresh".(ll) In his Notes for this scene, Dostoevsky creates a similarity relation between the incomprehension of non-Euclidean geometry and the inconceivability of the world finale of harmony when the mother will embrace her son's murderer: "Možeš' ponjat', kak parallel'nye linii sojdutsja?" and "Možeš' ponjat', kak mat' obnimaet generala i prostit emu?" (XV.228, see also XV.231). By the process of metaphor, aspects of one object are carried over to another so that one can speak of the second object as if it were the first. The goal is to reach semantic equivalence with a view to clarification and enhanced comprehension. But if metaphors can clarify, they can also pervert. Objectively these two phrases, whose terms have such radically different referents, would appear to be totally dissimilar. But Ivan, driven by his overriding need to prove the absurdity of existence, constructs the geometric metaphor. For him the idea joining the two phrases is incomprehensibility, ergo absurdity. Ivan uses one hypothetical unknown, the meeting of parallel lines, to deny another, ultimate harmony, in order to negate this known world, to reinforce the idea that this world is senseless and gives no evidence of harmony now or to come. Examining the terms of the metaphor, it emerges that Ivan converts the human and divine into the impersonal and inanimate with his abstract metaphorical substitutes.

But all this is because geometry is not the main point. Geometry proves nothing one way or the other about the existence of God. What Ivan is really aiming at is the idea that since non-Euclidean geometry is not of this world, God is not of this world. What really troubles Ivan is not geometry, but God's remoteness. God is infinitely far away. He is at that place where two parallel lines meet. This means that God has, in effect, abandoned man, that God is "not of this world". For Ivan this is equivalent to saying that God is nowhere. This despair, which is genuine, is the source of his nihilism. Non-Euclidean geometry, then, is a symbol for God's absence from this world, for the Deus absconditius.

Finally we must ask why does Ivan seek to prove to Alyosha that God is incomprehensible and infinitely remote? He says to his brother:

Da i tebe sovetuju ob ètom nikogda ne dumat', drug Alëša, a pušče vsego našče't Boga: est' li On ili net? Vse eto voprosy soveršenno nesvojstvennye umu, sozdannomu so ponjatiem liš' o trëx izmerenijax (XIV.2I4).

The reader can hardly miss the air of patronizing arrogance which hovers around Ivan's attitude towards Alyosha. It is not tender solicitude for Alyosha's sanity that prompts Ivan to offer his unsought advice, but a malicious wish to shatter Alyosha's faith. As Vetlovskaya has shown, Ivan's "tirade" is a sermon directed against God and consequently "ona stanovitsja ne prosto

propoved'ju, no iskušeniem...Iskušsaja brata svoego, Ivan ispolnjaet d'javol'skuju missiju." Revealing the hidden voice prompting Ivan, Vetlovskaya adds: "Alëša (i čitatel) slušaja Ivana, slušaet samogo d'javola".(12) In a final ironic twist it is Ivan who, listening to the devil, has jeopardized his sanity by thinking about "questions not suitable to a mind created with a conception of only three dimensions".

Nevertheless, although Ivan's present intentions are diabolical; his feeling of orphaned, cosmic loneliness is genuine, viewed personally and historically. Ivan's intellectual accusation against God Who has absconded masks his longstanding emotional accusation against his father who abandoned him. On the broad scale of history, every major step forward in science has proved a step farther away from God. The discovery of the non-Euclidean plane was not only a "psychological breakthrough", it was for many yet another psychological shock dealt by the emergence of modem science. Euclid's geometry, which conformed to the three dimensional Reality of human sensory perceptions, was long thought to be the immutable reflection of eternal Truth, of the majesty and harmony of God's creation. Dostoevsky lived long enough to witness its demotion and to weave the new extension of geometry into the metaphorical and symbolic system of his last novel.

So far Ivan, in Zosima's words, has been "amusing" himself with his "despair", but after the murder of Fyodor, his ideas can no longer be seen just as topics for "žumal'nye stat'i i svetskie spory" (XIV.65). Then the devil arrives, but shortly before the nightmare, Mitya expresses his view of science in quite a different key from Ivan.

Visiting Mitya on the eve of the trial, Alyosha finds him fraught, confused and despondent:

Nu, Aleksej, propala teper' moja golova!, but not because of the trial. Golova ne propala, a to, čto v golove sidelo, to propalo Idei, idei, vot čto! (XV.27).

At first Mitya speaks incoherently of "èfika", Claude Bernard:

Efika. Èto cto kakoe èfika?...Da, nauka, cto li, kakaja?... Klod Bernr. Èto čto takoe? Ximija, čto li?... vse podlecy...Ux Bernary! Mnogo ix rasplodilos'! (XV,27). Later he exclaims: Alëša, xeruvim ty moj, menja ubivajut raznye filosofii, čort ix deri! (XV,31).

Trying to get to the bottom of Mitya's troubled spirit, Alyosha presses him for an explanation. Mitya replies:

Otčcego propal? Gm. V suščnosti...esli vse' celoe vzjat' - Boga žalko, vot ot čego! (XV.28).

Two millennia of Christianity militant and triumphant come to Mitya's "I am sorry for God!". We need only compare Mitya's cri de coeur with the rapturous faith in God's ultimate majestic triumph that we find in Dante, Milton or Goethe to appreciate the enormous shift that has taken place in European thought on the heels of the scientific revolution. The pathos of a great historical drama, its ancient beginning and modern decline, sounds forth in these few words and meets in the tragic pathos of Mitya's plight, his cross, his imitation of the Passion. What has brought Mitya to this lament?

It quickly emerges that Rakitin has been giving Mitya lessons in scientific materialism and determinism via Claude Bernard's recent discovery of the vasomotor system. Explaining it to Alyosha in his own words, Mitya fills them, as Bakhtin would say, with his own beliefs and intentions, and I would add, his own emotional response. In a short speech interspersed with three devil curses, Mitya describes human nerve endings as "xvostiki". Coming to the heart of the matter Mitya says:

vot potemu ja i sozercaju, a potom myslju...potomu čto xvostiki, a vovse ne potomu, čto u menja duša i čto ja tam kakoj-to obraz i podobie... Velikolepna, Alëša, èta nauka! Novyj čelovek pojdet, eto-to ja ponimaju...A vse'-taki Boga zalko (XV.28).

Rakitin has been promoting the scientific discoveries of Claude Bernard to undermine Mitya's

faith, the "new man" he has found in himself since his dream of the babe. In the space of a scant two pages, Mitya twice calls Rakitin "svin'ja", and utters nine devil curses, including a fourfold repetition of "čort ego deri!". Significant for symbolic analysis is the profusion of plurals, "idei", "podlecy", "Ux, Bernary! Mnogo ix rasplodilos'!", "filosofii", "xvostiki". Discussing the parable of ihe Gadarene swine, Starobinski observes: "...evil is always on the side of plurality: whether it be a matter of illness, demonic hostility, or unbelief, the adverse element is always plural".(13) This idea is ancient The Pythagoreans held that "the indefinite dyad is a daimon and evil, concerned with material plurality".(14) The association "xvostiki" as a metaphorical equivalent for devils' tails is inevitable.(15) So, a scientific fact, refracted in Mitya's language, has become a metaphor for demonic invasion of the human nervous system. This gives rise to the correlation: Rakitin, in attempting to replace the soul, the "obraz i podobie", with chemistry, and the old morality with a secular ethics, is doing the devil's work. The "science" of ethics, which Rakitin preaches, is effectively compromised and dissociated from morality when we learn here that Rakitin has given up the monastic life. Rakitin's hatred of God ("A ne ljubit Boga Rakitin, ux ne ljubit!") allies him too with the devil (XV.29). Now Rakitin's talks with Kolya, the "young Ivan" who asserts: "Ja uvažaju odnu matematiku i estestvennye" also take on demonic meaning (XIV.497). When Alyosha tells Kolya that the devil "zalez vo vse pokolenie", we can now identify the devil's offspring and the ideas they are spreading (XIV.503). The proliferation of Bernards (and Rakitins) harks back to Father Paisy's warning about the proliferation of atheistic scientists destroying the sacred "Xristov oblik" with their cruel analysis. One section of the text projects forwards, its complement echoes back and the reader makes the join in, as Auerbach says, "an act of spiritual understanding".

Rakitin, though, is a petty demon, so far sowing no more than doubt and mischief. The author has much larger ones to show.

Precisely when Ivan can no longer hide from himself his complicity in his father's murder, his former ideas, now repugnant to him, come to haunt him in the guise of the devil, who amplifies the geometric symbol and twists it to his intentions. Trying to ingratiate himself with Ivan, the devil says:

Ved' ja i sam, kak i ty že, stradaju ot fantastičeskogo, a potomu i ljublju vaš zemnoj realizm. Tut u vas vsë očerčeno, tut formula, tut geometrija, a u nas vsë kakie-to neopredelënnye uravnenija! (XV.73).

Defining "earthly realism" in determinate, Euclidean mathematical terms, the devil reduces earthly life to an abstraction. As we know, Ivan does not love "earthly realism", its "èvklidovskaja dič'" (XIV.222). He rejects this world while secretly hoping for a better one beyond, but having no evidence of it, despairs of its existence. But the devil immediately demolishes Ivan's tenuous hope when he defines his realm beyond the earth in terms of total mathematical indeterminacy. For the devil comes from the infinite reaches where "non-Euclidean geometry" and "indeterminate equations" are the norm, where there are no outlines, and thus no stable images, where there is no up or down, high or low, right or wrong. Formulae and Euclidean geometry admit of reassuring predictions and definite calculations, but "indeterminate equations" have no fixed values, no fixed extensions. In fact, most equations have indeterminate terms. But again, mathematics per se, is not the point. Ivan wants to know, once and for all, does God exist: "Est" Bog ili net?" But from the devil he will get only indeterminate answers: A, tak ty ser'ëzno? Golubčik moj, ej-Bogu ne znaju, vot velikoe slovo skazal" (XV.77). Thus "indeterminate equations" have become a metaphor of indeterminate faith and so mirror Ivan's dilemma. Combining the notion of indeterminacy with the universal quantifier "all", the devil maximizes the temptation to despair.

Complaining about his baffling role of negation in the universe, the devil returns to his metaphor of mathematical indeterminacy: "Ja stradaju, a vsë že ne živu. Ja iks v neopredelënnom uravnenii" (XV.77). X is the symbol used when a person's name is unknown, or is to be left undetermined, and this perfectly accords with the devil's having "forgotten" what to call himself. But now the devil takes the metaphor much further: he is that critical element which converts determinacy into indeterminacy. "Ja iks", where "x" is the universal symbol of the unknown factor, is a metaphor of the type A is B. This is an inversion on Christ's self defining metaphors of A is B (Ja svet

miru, Ja esm' dver') and nicely complements the notion of the devil as anti-Christ, the total inversion of all Christ's qualities, of His two natures.

The same type of metaphor is embedded in a subsequent mathematical reference where the devil depicts himself as a long suffering victim who has been assigned the onerous, inescapable task of leading people into temptation and evil. Why this should be so is a mystery to him:

Ja ved' znaju, tut est' sekret, no sekret mne ni za čto ne xotjat otkryt', potomu čto ja, požaluj, togda, dogadavšiš' v čëm delo, rjavknu "osannu" i totčas isčeznet neobxodimyj minus i načnëtsja vo vsë'm mire blagorazumnie (XV,82).

Another non-self definition involving a mathematical symbol gives us the metaphor "I am the necessary minus". "Necessary" implies a plan. If the devil is "necessary", it can only be a divine plan. Now "minus" is not equivalent to non-existence but to a negative quantity or quality. In other words, if we have -x, we still have a notion of x. Even the devil is not equal to that "absolute zero" ("soveršennyj nul) Ivan gave in reply to Fyodor's catechism on the existence of God and immortality, and which Paisy's "absolutely nothing" subtly prefigured.

The devil too takes up the topic of science in a discourse which curiously confirms Paisy's, only from the opposite perspective. Referring to the recent advances in earthly science, he says:

u nas tam vse teper' pomutilis', i vsë ot vašix nauk. Eščë poka byli atomy, pjat' čuvstv, četyre stixii, nu togda vsë koe-kak kleilos'. Atomy-to i v drevnem mire byli. A vot kak uznali u nas, čto vy tam otkryli u sebja 'ximičeskuju molekulu', da 'protoplazmu', da čort znaet čto eščë, - tak u nas i podžali xvosty. Prosto sumbur načalos'; glavnoe - sueverie, spletni...i donosy (XV,78).

The science of classical Greece posed no threat to Christian doctrine; it not only coexisted with Christianity, but was accepted by the Church as immutable truth. Nature was held to be the objective correlate of God's creation and the study of nature was one way to an understanding of God. As Heninger says, "Science at this stage was a handmaiden to religion, not its competitor or adversary".(16) This comfortable religious and scientific stasis persisted for many centuries. "Everything somehow held together". But now, with the growth of modern scientific methods and instruments which made possible such discoveries as the "chemical molecule" and "protoplasm", science is sowing confusion in the devil's realm. For if these modem scientific discoveries are a threat to faith, they are also a threat to the devil. At one stroke they may dispense with faith both in God and His ancient antagonist, Satan. If God's power is relentlessly on the wane, so is Satan's, for an atheist neither worships the one nor fears the other. Thus, the devils arc emasculated, "they have hung their tails between their legs". "Superstition, scandal mongering and denunciations" are characteristic of realms where fear has taken hold, where the inhabitants feel under threat because all the traditional sources of authority are breaking down. The devil's world is a mirror image of the Earth where the same effects due to the weakening hold of Christianity can be observed. No wonder that Ivan, the ambivalent "atheist" who longs to believe, "strangely, suddenly adds", in the midst of his protestations that the devil is a mere phantom of his delirium: "Ja vpročem, želal by v tebja poverit'!" (XV,79).

Continuing his torment of Ivan, the devil advances a vision of cosmic palingenesis which rests on the findings of geology and astronomy:

Da ved' teperešnjaja zemlja, možet, sama-to billion raz povtorjalas'; nu, otživala, ledenela, treskalas', rassypalas', razlagalas' na sostavnye načala, opjat' voda, jaže be nad tverdiju, potom opjat' kometa, opjat' solnce, opjat' iz solnca zemlja, - ved' èto razvitie, možet, uže beskonečno raz povtorjat'sja, i vsë v odnom i tom že vide, do čërtočki. Skušča nepriličnejšaja (XV,79).

Here the devil adumbrates a cosmography of recurrent catastrophe amidst total inanimate desolation The subject of his first phrase is the "earth" as a geological object, utterly devoid of life and spirit, the human and divine. All the verbs he intones to depict the terrestrial cycles are

intransitive, conveying self-repeating processes. All denote disintegration, annihilation and colossal movements of massive inanimate matter. Significantly the devil quotes only a fragment of Genesis 1.7: "And God made the firmament, and divided the waters under the firmament from the waters above the firmament; and it was so." Omitting the biblical subject, God, and the transitive verbs which signify His cosmic creative acts, the devil banishes God the Creator from the universe and replaces Him with a positivist, self-existent, self-acting and self-perpetuating cosmogony. If for Ivan God is absent from this world, the devil again maximizes his despair by insinuating that God is absent from the universe, that He is not even at that place where parallel lines meet. Annexing the idea of an infinitely repeating series, the devil converts terrestrial and solar evolution from a linear one, in which change is possible, into a cosmogony of the vicious circle, the hell of doomed repetition. The style is one with the content: twice the devil uses the verb "repeat", for the second time (in this chapter) he quotes the same phrase from Genesis, the comet, sun and earth repeat their inexorable cycles and four times the devil repeats "again" so that his word becomes a kind of stupefying incantation meant to evoke the numbing tedium, the horror of the no way out process he is describing. Implicit in the devil's scheme is that human beings arc helplessly trapped, condemned perpetually to re-experience their earthly misery "to the smallest detail". Forever spinning around with insentient inorganic masses in an immutable cycle, humanity approximates the attributes of brute matter. The devil's circle is vicious because no one can ever ascend to a higher level of spiritual being. There is no redemption, no salvation, no divine mercy or love. More, innocent suffering can never be atoned. Indeed, it will be eternally repeated "to the smallest detail". With the insidious implications of his cosmogony, the devil infinitely extends the grounds for Ivan's accusations against God on innocent unatoned suffering, those powerful accusations with which Ivan briefly overwhelmed Alyosha. It would be hard to imagine a more hellish vision.

Nearing the end of his discourse, the devil sums up Ivan's recent composition on a future Utopian society oddly entitled "Geologičeskij perevorot":

Raz čelovečestvo otrečëtsja pogolovno ot Boga (a ja verju, čto ètot period, parallel'no geologičeskim periodam, soveršitsja) to samo soboju...padët vsë prežnie mirovozzrenic i, glavnoe, vsja prežnjaja nravstvennost', i nastupit vsë novoe... Čelovek vozveličitsja duxom božeskoj, tilaničeskoj gordosti i javitsja človek-bog. Ežečasno pobeždaja uže bez granic prirodu, voleju svocju i naukoj, čelovek tem samym ežečasno budet oščuščat' naslaždenie stol' vysokoe, čto ono zamenit emu vse prežnie upovanija naslaždenij nebesnyx (XV,83).

"Perevorot" translates "revolution" as well as "the Flood" (vsemimyj potop). The compound title phrase is a geological term for sudden convulsions or alterations of the earth's strata. Ivan's Utopian fantasy is intended as a final stage in human and social development, when "čelovečestvo ustroitsja okončatel'no" (XV.83). His title, then, is at once scientific and biblical, revolutionary and apocalyptic. "Geological periods", which denotes the science of the earth's crust through the aeons, is most apropos to Ivan's strictly geocentric Utopia. So Ivan created another parallel between scientific findings and an imagined human situation, only now with important differences. His first parallel is an eschatological analogy between two unimaginable ideas, the meeting of parallel lines and the finale of universal divine harmony. In that instance, Ivan fits the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry into a rhetorical argument whose purpose is to tempt Alyosha, Božij čelovek, into joining him in cursing God's world. Here, Ivan draws a parallel between two secular ideas, terrestrial geology and a kind of Utopian socialism. Since these ideas occur in an evidently unpublished and so far uncommunicated "poèmka", they are not deformed by any immediate, open rhetorical aims and therefore reflect his consciously true views. It now emerges that the devil's cosmogony of deadly repetition is a covert answer to Ivan's recent Utopian fantasy which rests on the idea of linear, progressive evolution, geological and societal. But the devil, with his cosmography of eternally repealing terrestrial and cosmic cataclysm, mocks Ivan's faith in science to effect an inevitable revolution that will establish an earthly paradise.

Again the inanimate dominates Ivan's imagery. His designation of his earthly paradise of new people in terms of a science which studies inorganic rock formations accords with the novel's symbolism as well as his image-word. The huge, multitudinous rocks of the earth's crust provide a symbolic contrast to other stone motifs in the novel. These dead stones arc far removed from

Ilyusha's stone, emblematic of commemoration and love between father and son. They are light years away from Peter the rock on whom Christ founded His church. Ivan's utopian fantasy is founded on the "rock" of Karamazov sensuality now supported by the potential of science to extend the sensual pleasures of earthly life. The theme of the "Bernards" and "Rakitins", of the "new people" of science of whom Paisy and Mitya spoke, has reappeared, but Ivan has taken it much further. Transforming the "new man" of science into the proud "man-god" who will steadily subdue nature to his will, Ivan has appropriated the deceitful promise of the serpent Satan that "Ye shall be as gods" by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge (Genesis 3.5). This suggests that Ivan's Utopia is a diabolic temptation, fraught with incalculable consequences as momentous, perhaps, as the Fall. Science is the indispensable instrument for the realization of free will, for the implementation of the future technological "golden age". But Ivan's Utopia of science and free will is a pale perversion of that stupendous vision of paradise glimpsed by his philosopher in the legend he composed in adolescence. Now, for Ivan, the enjoyment in subduing nature through the mastery of science becomes the substitute for religion, for "all the former hopes of heavenly joys". For the necessary and sufficient requirement for ushering in this Utopia is the total and permanent destruction of the very idea of God in every human head. This, the devil reminds Ivan, "rešil ty eščë prošloju vesnoj, sjuda sobirajas'" (XV,83). And this is the root idea with which Ivan intellectually seduced Smerdyakov, who killed Fyodor and then himself. This idea has now become hateful to Ivan. Minutes later Ivan, the natural scientist, hurls the glass at the devil, thereby acknowledging his existence, and falls into severe mental breakdown.

And so the devil harrows Ivan, the natural scientist, by taking Ivan's own scientific images and ideas to extremes with the notion of infinity in order to induce maximum despair. The mathematical allusions and images of lifeless matter which mark their speech reflect their abstract, theoretical lives and serve as metaphors for a steadily encroaching materialist world view. With varied motifs of upheaval and extinction, of fragmenting and colliding matter, the devil projects a meaningless universe where nothing holds together. Paisy's warning about atheist scientists who are fragmenting the "whole", is now confirmed in the devil's temptational word where the idea has become one with its diabolic locus.

Trapped in his own vicious circle, in the indefinite limbo between diametrically opposed alternatives, Ivan endures a refined mental torture, as the "indefinite dyad [who] is a daimon and evil" well knows when he taunts Ivan: "Ja tebja vožu meždu veroj i bezveriem poperemenno, i tut u menja svoja cel'" (XV,80). And so the devil uses indeterminate equations, which arc capable of an infinite number of possible solutions, in order to torture Ivan on his sorest point, his wish to solve the one problem, to ascertain the existence of God and immortality. The devil haunts Ivan with visions of emptiness, hopelessness and with indeterminacy he blurs and all but obliterates the divine presence. Instead of using mathematics to clarify, enlighten or prove, the devil perverts it in order to confuse, obscure and sow despair, just as Ivan did with Alyosha. Now, Ivan's former mockery of the sacred, bent by his devil's words, almost destroys him. And he remembers that hellish night and tells it to the narrator who retells it lo us through his memory.

Thus, in Brat'ja Karamazovy, science is not neutral. Ivan's scientific world view, as a dominant consultant of his beliefs, becomes entangled with his intentions, with his half conscious malevolent purposes. The plot line is meant to be an enactment of the horrific consequences of Ivan's ideas. It is not science per se which becomes progressively invested with sinister potential, but science as practiced and promoted by those who are implacably hostile to faith. As nauka passes through their voices, it gains in ominous intensity, culminating in Ivan's devil, to whom Dostoevsky gave the greatest number, and the broadest range, of references to science. At the same time Dostoevsky's last novel represents his attempt lo reaffirm Christianity. This imposed on him the task of renewing Christian terms, symbols and images in a contemporary setting. Thus he gives nauka a new meaning in Zosima's idea of "active love". In this way, nauka falls on both sides of the novel's fundamental opposition between good and evil, faith and atheism.

So too, in Brat'ja Karamazovy, scientific facts are not just sober facts, but are poetically transformed by metonymies, metaphors and symbols composed on oppositions between demonic and sacred motifs. These value laden oppositions are integrated into the ideological and pragmatic plot by the larger poetic structures of parallelism and prefiguration. Paisy's word sets the

NOTE: In the original p. 83 is a duplicate of p. 82 (K.L.).

prefigurative pattern. Then three symbolic parallels are successively created, all synonymously patterned on the attempt by one person to shatter and mock the other's faith, or struggle with faith. In each case the agents profess allegiance to science and advance scientific facts in furtherance of their destructive aims. Thus, Ivan uses non-Euclidean geometry to undermine Alyosha's faith, Rakitin uses the vaso-motor system to demoralize Milya, and the devil uses indeterminate equations and a godless, eternally cyclical cosmogony to drive Ivan insane. These champions of science, who include a careerist sneak, a charming but "corrupted" schoolboy (potentially), a murderer and the devil, are all deeply involved with atheism. All arc motivated by malice, a demonic trait. In each case a scientific fact is selected which seems to prove the non-existence of God, the absence of any divine element or purpose on earth or in heaven. Since nothing for atheist scientists is sacred, then, in the words of the hero-natural scientist, "vsë pozvoleno". Thus, scientific facts become implicated in transcendental issues and absorbed into the novel's eschatological dialogue which exhibits a binary system of faith versus atheism. The purpose of these parallels, then, is to reinforce the notion of similarity and to promote a sense of proliferating evil. At the same time, the succession of parallel structures orchestrates a movement of intensifying evil which ends in the crescendo of Ivan's nightmare and breakdown.

Furthermore, each parallel points to a great modem dilemma beyond the novel. The question of where a thoroughly secularized science is taking us has become acute. Ivan's aching sense of God's absence, Mitya's sorrowful apprehension over an embattled God, and the devil's haunting of Ivan with indeterminacy and a materialistic universe are all variations of that psychic pain which pervades the modem consciousness because of the erosion of the sacred, the pitiless reduction of human beings to functional units, and the breakdown of shared spiritual values following the rise of modern science.

True, Dostoevsky composed the novel in line with his own beliefs. This tempts some to pronounce his work, and even all literature, as purely rhetorical. But Dostoevsky's poetic transformations, I believe, are not just rhetorical devices deployed to persuade or trick the reader. Literature is a channel for conveying not only beliefs, but unfinished journeys to beliefs. Then there are intrinsic aesthetic aspects to nature, space, time, mathematics and infinity. The artistic organization of an aesthetic response to the objective world is also a way of trying to attain knowledge, to penetrate the mysteries of the universe. Dostoevsky discerned a providential pattern, a divine truth at work behind all phenomena. Through the artistic mode of prefiguration he expresses this vision in Brat'ja Karamazovy. The fulfillment of Paisy's prophecy is a mimesis of this idea.

But I have looked at only part of his prophecy, the easier part. For to show how the other part is fulfilled, namely, to reveal how the image of Christ lives and prevails in the novel's world, requires painstaking, "cruel analysis". Here I could give only a few indications. So subtly, so ingeniously is it embedded in the whole novel that it cannot be accommodated in the little space we have.

NOTES

See especially M.M. Bakhlin, "Discourse in the Novel, The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin, Texas, 1981, pp. 259-422.
The Russian "nauka" is more comprehensive than the English "science", since il includes the notion of systematic scholarship. Earlier Dostoevsky appears to have used "nauka" also in the German sense of "philosophy" (see Joseph Frank, The Stir of Liberation 1860-1865, Princeton, 1986, p. 304). In Brat'ja Karamazovy, "nauka" usually means "science". (See also footnote 6.)
Roman Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics", Selected Writings III, The Hague, 1981, 18-51, (p. 25).

All quotations of Brati'ja Karamazovy are taken from Polno sobranie sočnenij v tridcati tomax, toma XIV-XV, Leningrad, 1976, except that Dostoevsky's majuscules for God have been restored. Volume and page number arc enclosed in parentheses.
Sven Linnér, Father Zosima, A Study in the Mimesis of Virtue, Stockholm, 1977, p. 36.
Paisy's use of "mirskaja nauka" can be fairly extended to both senses of "nauka", although the notion of "scholarship" may be uppermost in his discourse since one can detect in it a partially "hidden polemic" with nineteenth century German and French biblical scholarship, in particular with Strauss and Renan. However, in Brat'ja Karamazovy as a whole, the modem sense "science" predominates over "scholarship" firstly, because Ivan, one of the major ideological heroes, is a natural scientist and those who share his views are all the champions of science and mathematics. Secondly, and most important, "nauka" denotes an ascendant materialist and positivist Weltanschauung which denies absolutely any transcendental first causes underlying phenomena.
Jostein Børtnes, "The Function of Hagiography in Dostoevsky's Novels", Scando-Slavica, 24 (1978), 27-33, (p.29).
Biblical quotations are taken from Dostoevsky's edition of the New Testament, Gospoda našego Iisusa Xrista Novyj zavet, Sanktpeterburg, 1823.
Lars Gårding, Encounter with Mathematics, New York, Heidelberg, Berlin, 1977, p. 60.
Victor Terras, A Karamazov Companion, Commentary on the Genesis, Language and Style of Dostoevsky's Novel, Madison, Wisconsin, 1981, p. 219.
Aristotle, "Rhetoric", Book III, Chapter 10, Rhetoric and Poetics, translated by W. Rhys Roberts, New York, 1954, p 186.
V. E. Vetlovskaja, Poetika romana "Brat'ja Karamazovy", Leningrad, 1977, pp. 98, 100.
Jean Starobinski, "The Struggle with Legion: A Literary Analysis of Mark 5:1-20", New Literary History, 4, 1973, 331-56, (p. 341).
From the doxographic tradition cited by W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol I, Cambridge, 1977, p. 248. The Pythagoreans also associated God and the good with the idea of unity, or the whole. The full quotation reads: "Of the principles, Pythagoras said that the Monad was God and the good, the true nature of the One, Mind itself; but the indefinite dyad is a daimon and evil, concerned with material plurality". I should like to thank Professor M. Hanak for drawing my attention to the Pythagorean source for this idea.
Terras also interprets these plurals as "diabolic imagery". Sec his A Karamazov Companion, pp. 367-68.
S. K. Heningcr, Jr., Touches of Sweet Harmony, Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics, San Marino, California, 1974, p. 326.

NOTE ON NON-EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY

Ivan's appeal to non-Euclidean geometry has given rise to various inflated claims that Dostoevsky had an influence on the emergence of twentieth century physics, in particular, on the theory of relativity. The editors of the PSS, after acknowledging that non-Euclidean geometry was generally accepted only at the end of the 1860s, remark: "Dostoevski) byl znakom s osnovnymi principami geometrii N. I. Lobačevskogo, po vidimomu, ešče v Inženernom ucilišče" (XV.551). This is highly unlikely. Lobachevsky worked in isolation and his fame was largely posthumous, though he received some recognition in 1842 when he was elected foreign correspondent to the Royal Society of Göttingen. During the years Dostoevsky attended the Academy of Engineers (1838-43) there was no mathematician in Russia who fully understood Lobachevsky's work, other than Lobachevsky himself. Referring to Lobachevsky's first public communication of his results in a lecture at the University of Kazan in 1826, E. T. Bell writes: "He might have been speaking in the middle of the Sahara Desert for all the echo he raised. Gauss did not hear of the work till about 1840".¹ The notion that Dostoevsky's teachers would have read, let alone understood, the obscure journal of the University of Kazan in which Lobachevsky's papers first appeared (1829, 1835-38) is hardly tenable. As late as 1840 Lobachevsky himself remarked in the Preface to his book on non-Euclidean geometry: "The extent of this work perhaps hindered my countrymen from following such a subject".² In Halsted's words: "At first these results were not fully understood even by the brightest intellects".³ Only in 1870 did the English mathematician, W. K. Clifford, come across Lobachevsky's discoveries.

Dostoevsky must have heard about non-Euclidean geometry much later, probably through Strakhov who was a trained natural scientist.⁴Indeed, E. I. Kijko, in his informative study, has recently traced the source for Dostoevsky's acquaintance with non- Euclidean geometry to a popular article by H. Helmholz on the new geometric theories which appeared in the journal Znanie in 1876 (122).⁵ Kijko also thinks it most likely that Strakhov, who is known to have read Helmholz's article, drew Dostoevsky's attention to it during their frequent conversations. Furthermore, as Kijko points out, the specific geometric idea Ivan quotes, namely, "two parallel lines which according to Euclid may never meet on earth, may meet at infinity", does not occur in Lobachevsky's work (120). It was not Lobachevsky but Riemann who first showed in 1854 (and in a paper published posthumously in 1868) that Euclid's parallel postulate does not apply to cosmic space (121). Thus, as Kijko says, Ivan's invocations of non-Euclidean geometry "most closely correspond to the ideas of Riemann's geometry", and not to those of Lobachevsky (121).

There are also problems with interpretation. According to the editors of the PSS, Dostoevsky has a "special significance" for the "development of science and philosophy in the twentieth century", for, in the guise of Ivan's criticism of the "Euclidean mind", Dostoevsky is expressing his

strastnoe utvedenie...vozmožnosti i neobxodimosti dlja čeloveka inogo, "neèvklidovskogo" soznanija...0ttalkivajas' ot geometričeskix idej N. I. Lobačevskogo, Dostoevski]' neposcredstvenno ustami Ivana perekidyvaet most k velikim fizičeskim otkrytijam i novym filisofskim idejam XX veka (XV.473).

To buttress this sweeping assertion, the editors lean heavily on a statement allegedly made by Einstein and quoted by A. Moszkowsky in his book, Conversations with Einstein:

Ne slucajno sotrudnik A. Einštejna i avtor knigi o ne'm A. Moškovskij privodit slova učënogo v besede s nim: "Dostoevskij daët mne bol'še, čem ljuboj naucnyj myslitel', bol'še, čem Gauss!"⁶ V ètix slovax polučilo vyraženie priznanie odnim iz velikix preobražobvatelej nauki XX v. novatorskogo xaraktera xudožestvenno-estetičeskix i filosofskix idej avtora 'Karamazovyx' (XV.473).

In the first place, Moszkowsky was not a "collaborator" of Einstein, but a popularizer of science and philosophy eager to capitalize on Einstein's recent and sudden rise to world-wide fame.⁷ Max and Hedwig Born urged Einstein in the strongest possible terms to stop the publication of Moszkowsky's book.⁸ They objected to the sensational publicity surrounding the book which they

thought would be harmful both to science and to Einstein's reputation, and were particularly concerned about possible antisemitic repercussions. Also, on the strength of Moszkowsky's previous publications, bearing "frivolous titles", they had little confidence in the content of the book. Born was already enquiring about legal measures and seeking the aid of others. Einstein was generally indifferent, but at last informed Born that he had "categorically forbidden publication of X's book", and had threatened to break with Moszkowsky. In the end, Moszkowsky's book appeared, without, Einstein said, "my having read any of it". Einstein evidently let the matter drop because he sympathized with Moskowsky's need to earn money, and because, Born surmises, Einstein wished to show his gratitude towards Moszkowsky for having helped him when he was ill in Berlin during the war. In retrospect, Born thinks he and his wife had been too vehement: the book "is not as bad as I had expected". However, he still finds the "scientific part primitive and containing frequent misunderstandings", and thinks they were right in principle, or, in Einstein's words, "objectively right".

Einstein's alleged remark has led other interpreters to confuse the incommensurable tasks of art and science. Boris Kuznetsov has erected a whole edifice of egregious speculation on Einstein's remark which he quotes in his very first sentence and once subsequently without acknowledgement (7,59).⁹ Kuznetsov defines Dostoevsky's poetics as "rationalist" because his characters' speech is "wholly determined by thoughts" (16-17). Dostoevsky's "realism", he says, "was experimental" in that "Thought is put to the test, it is subjected to crucial experiments" (89). The idea that Dostoevsky subverted his "subjective", "anti-rationalist intentions" by his "rationalist poetics" and "experimental realism" is essential for Kuznetsov's argument in which he attempts to link Dostoevsky's art with Einstein's scientific work (16,18).

Kuznetsov finds that in Dostoevsky's "craving for harmony...lie the points of contact between Dostoevsky's artistic creativity and Einstein's scientific creativity" (24). He centers Dostoevsky's "craving for harmony" on Ivan's rejection of both Euclidean and non-Euclidean harmony. Kuznetsov equates Euclidean geometry with Dostoevsky's "simple and traditional...faith in providential harmony", in "official orthodoxy". (In fact Ivan metaphorically equates Euclidean geometry with the absurdities of this world.) Non-Euclidean geometry he identifies with a "macroscopic" providential harmony which is "paradoxical" since it fails to account for individual fates, and is therefore "not a moral harmony" (51,52). After quoting Einstein's remark again, Kuznetsov informs us that his project is "to draw parallels between the content of Dostoevsky's artistic work and the content of Einstein's scientific work" (59). The question of whether such a project is feasible on any serious grounds apparently does not even occur to Kuznetsov. According to him, Ivan (whom Kuznetsov conflates with Dostoevsky) had to reject "Euclidean" and "non-Euclidean harmony" because he could not yet see the progressive solution offered by twentieth century science. Thus, Dostoevsky had to leave Ivan's dilemma as the question -"Where can the conditions be found for moral harmony?" - which the twentieth century has "answered", thanks to Einstein and modern science (103).

Kuznetsov devotes much of his book to outlining the "answer". Pressing his "points of contact" and "parallels", Kuznetsov performs a series of breathtaking leaps when he assures us that the search for cosmic harmony in nature, through the investigations of relativity and particle physics, will lead to moral and social harmony. Kuznetsov's basic assumption is that the applications of modern science have "social, intellectual and moral effects" which must necessarily be beneficial and "progressive". Given that, it is not surprising that he evinces an unbounded faith in science, human nature and social planning when he proclaims that "Man's conscience is inseparable from his growing power over nature" and "Nowadays no one would dare to plan a general harmony which disregarded individual fates" (101,103). So, he reasons, the practical implementation of Einstein's ideas, coupled with cybernetic automation and computerization will insure the attainment of a high standard of production, which in turn will lead to the "eradication of hostile labour relations" and thus a harmonious moral and social system (102). This is because in modern science macroscopic, relativistic "cosmic processes are inseparable, physically, from ultra microscopic processes" (106). Here he assumes that applications of particle physics act directly on "individual fates". He then asserts the converse "isomorphism", namely, the study of ultra-microscopic processes entails the introduction of "macroscopic concepts" which act directly on society (106). At this point he makes plain his ideological stance: "Modern notions of moral

harmony require that an individual existence be determined by its importance to the collective destiny" (106). From here it is but a small step for Kuznetsov to conclude that modern science will take into account both the collective destiny and "individual fates", thus insuring that a sense of collective and individual responsibility, and consequently social and moral harmony, will universally ensue. Thus Dostoevsky's question, which is the only aspect of Dostoevsky that interests him, is "answered" (106,108). By now the reader may well wonder what all this has to do with either Einstein or Dostoevsky.

Kuznetsov's excursions into relativity and particle physics stem largely from a determination to dismiss as "unconvincing...illusory, even pathological" those connections with Christian spirituality and symbolism which Dostoevsky has so explicitly established (58). What Kuznetsov really wants to discredit are what he calls Dostoevsky's "erroneous or reactionary...political and social ideas", the "negative irrationalism of his intellectual views" (12,69). Kuznetsov dubs Dostoevsky the "justly forgotten reactionary" and condescendingly asserts that a "new social harmony...was being conducted along lines incomprehensible to Dostoevsky" (106,107). But since Dostoevsky is a Russian writer of world significance, some formula must be found to make him acceptable to "socialism", and to claim him for the modem scientific world view. This is Kuznetsov's real project. This is why he has to make a case for Dostoevsky's "rationalist poetics" through which Dostoevsky "unconsciously" expressed the "progressive social ideas of his time" (25). No wonder that he, and others of his persuasion, have seized upon Einstein's alleged remark.

Grigory Pomerants, in his otherwise stimulating essay, also stumbles over Einstein's allusion to Dostoevsky and Gauss, though for quite different reasons. After quoting Einstein's remark (inaccurately and without acknowledgement), Pomerants says that he finds the allusion to Gauss "strange" since Gauss could not possibly have exercised an "aesthetic, philosophical, moral, religious" influence on Einstein.¹⁰ This leads Pomerants into the following non sequitur:

Trudy Gaussa pomogli Ejnštejnu razrabotat' matematičeskij apparat teorii otnositel'nosti. Značit, Dostoevskij imenno v ètom, v sozdanii teorii omositel'nosti, čem-to pomog Ejnštejnu, i očen' sil'no - bol'še Gaussa. Cem že? Ja dumaju, "reljativistiskoj" strukturoj svoego romana.

Pomerants, in introducing the verb "help", has transferred the same sense in which Gauss "helped" Einstein, to Dostoevsky, and on this misleading transference Pomerants places the main weight of his deduction. Moreover, if Gauss could not have influenced Einstein humanistically (a debatable point), why insist that Dostoevsky "helped" Einstein mathematically by recourse to a relativistic metaphor for the Dostoevskian novel? Although Pomerants quickly concedes that the Dostoevskian novel is not, strictly speaking, "relativistic" but "hypostatic", it can still be related mathematically to Einstein's thought since

vsjakaja ipostasnaja konstrukcija, načinaja s xristianskoj Troicy, možet byt' interpretirovana kak reljativistskaja model'. Eto osobenno jasno pri popytkax perevoda teologičeskix terminov na matematičeskij jazyk, naprimer, u Nikolaja Kuzanskogo: "Bog - eto sfera, centr kotoroj vsjudu, a periferija nigde". Vselennaja, centr kotoroj vsjudu - èto uže počti Ejnštejn. I možno predpoložit', čto Ejnštejn, citaja roman Dostoevskogo "perevël" ego strukturnyj princip na abstraktnyj matematičeskij jazyk...

Such fanciful translations from literary art and theological terms into "abstract mathematical language" betray an unfamiliarity with the nature of mathematical thought and discovery. While poetry, theology and mathematics may share analogical formal aesthetic features, this can only be shown by careful structural analysis, and not by unverifiable speculations about "translations" which ignore essential distinctions.

Pomerants next assumes that a new artistic vision can act as a prior stimulus for the creation of new scientific models:

I vsjakij nazrevšij, nenadumannyj formal 'nyj sdvig v iskusstve označaet novoe videnie mira, sposobnoe podtolknut' učënogo k sozdaniju "bezumnyx" (i evrističeski cennyx)
89

modelej. Kak by to ni bylo voobšče, otnositel'no Dostoevskogo i Ejnštejna takuju svjaz' možno sčitat' udostovercnnoj.

"Such a connection", in which Dostoevsky's formal artistic innovations are accorded inspirational priority, gives a facile impression of Einstein's scientific creativity. Einstein built his work not on novels, but on hard won previous scientific discoveries to which he brought his own uniquely profound physical insight. New mathematical ideas are generated from prior mathematical concepts, they grow out of the complex body of the mathematical tradition. The trouble is that Pomerants, in his eagerness to achieve a grandiose synthesis between the modes of religious, aesthetic and scientific thought on the basis of Dostoevsky's art, makes unwarranted inferences about Einstein's mental processes, and gives a false centrality to literature in his attempt to account for scientific creativity.

Kijko sheds far more light on Dostoevsky's art and thought when he turns to Dostoevsky's intriguing musings on infinity and geometry in the Notebooks. Kijko attributes Dostoevsky's interest in the nature of infinity, and consequently in non-Euclidean geometry, to his lifelong preoccupation with the existence of God (125-26). Quoting Dostoevsky's own words, Kijko hits the nail on the head when he says that Dostoevsky does not judge Ivan for having a Euclidean mind, but because he "distorted Christian faith" (XV.198), (128). However, even Kijko succumbs to the temptation of presenting Dostoevsky as an Einstein avant la lettre when he remarks that:

Dostoevsky obnaružil ne tol'ko osvedomlënnost', no i ponimanie koncepcij geometrov, obobščennyx i razvityx Rimanom" and "Dostoevskij ne tol'ko ponjal, no i usvoil...osnovnye idei neèvklidovoj geometrii, s trudom osvaivavščiesja specialistami-matematikami (121,128).

Here Kijko greatly exaggerates Dostoevsky's mastery of mathematics in order to establish a kindred link between Dostoevsky's artistic imagination and Einstein's scientific insights. This leads him to assert that Dostoevsky's ability "vyjavljat' pricinnuju zavisimost' paradoksal'nogo i očevidnogo, stol' jarko obnaruživščjasja v ego xudožestvennyx sozdanijax, očevidno, i obuslovila" Einstein to utter his "famous remark", with which Kijko concludes his study, as though that clinched the matter (128).

Dostoevsky's knowledge of the "fundamental ideas of non-Euclidean geometry" most likely extended no further than Ivan's summary remarks. Anyone can quote Einstein's famous equation, or the fact that no moving body can exceed the velocity of light, without having the slightest idea how Einstein arrived at his epochal results. Although some aspects of non-Euclidean geometry are not intuitively so abstruse and can be readily stated without recourse to formulae, it is extremely doubtful that Dostoevsky, who was not a mathematician, could have given any rigorous proofs of Lobachevsky's ideas, not to speak of Riemann's exceedingly subtle mathematical discoveries. Nor does it matter. What is important is how Dostoevsky uses them poetically, and the meanings they acquire within his artistic system.

Since Einstein's comment has given rise to the above tendentious, fanciful and misjudged interpretations, it behooves us to scrutinize its context. Let us return to Moszkowsky.

There is no reason to doubt that Einstein expressed his admiration for Dostoevsky, and in particular for The Brothers Karamazov. We also have C. P. Snow's word that Einstein considered The Brothers Karamazov to be "the supreme summit of all literature"." It is also possible that Einstein, in the course of a free ranging conversation, said Dostoevsky gives him more than Gauss, or something like it. We should bear in mind, though, that Einstein was not talking to a scientist, nor just about science and he adapted his language accordingly. Moreover, it is unlikely that all Einstein's words have been reported verbatim since Moszkowsky "developed" his text for publication "from conversations".

Einstein's remark arose in a conversation on those pleasures which afford "happiness of spirit". According to Moszkowsky, Einstein said:

I experience the greatest degree of pleasure in getting contact with works of Art... It is the moral impression, the feeling of elevation, that takes hold of me... I was thinking of these ethical factors when I gave preference to Dostojewski's works...[L]iterary analysis...a search for psychological subtleties...fail to penetrate to the heart of a work such as "The Karamasovs." This can be grasped only by means of the feelings, that find satisfaction in passing through trying and difficult circumstances, and that become intensified to exultation when the author offers the reader ethical satisfaction. Yes, that is the right expression, 'ethical satisfaction'! I can find no other words for it.¹²

Evidently what Einstein derived above all from The Brothers Karamazov was a sense of ethical triumph after "trying and difficult circumstances". This can only mean that Ivan's theses (and consequently those of his Grand Inquisitor and devil) are defeated and that good ultimately prevails in the novel's world, as Dostoevsky intended. It was the stirring of moral and ethical feelings, with which great literary art has been traditionally concerned, that made the greatest impact on Einstein. He says not a word about the novel's mathematical allusions, nor about the "innovatory nature" of Dostoevsky's "artistic-aesthetic and philosophical ideas", nor about Dostoevsky's gift for revealing "the causal dependence between the paradoxical and the obvious". Mathematicians find absurd the notion that Dostoevsky could have inspired Einstein's thought and, by specious implication his work, "more than Gauss". Finally, I have not been able to find in any of Einstein's ample writings, and reliably reported comments on general topics, a single reference to Dostoevsky or to The Brothers Karamazov, a rather odd omission for a thinker who gave Einstein "more than Gauss".¹³

These extravagant attempts to press Dostoevsky's poetic imagination into the service of twentieth century science spring, in part, from the fashionable idea that one confers intellectual respectability on literature by linking it with science. From this perspective, Einstein's scientific achievements are used to sanction Dostoevsky's literary work. And if one can advance the notion \ that Dostoevsky directly inspired Einstein's theory of relativity, then the trick is turned. Thus, / either Einstein is recruited for a synthetic philosophical project which takes off from Dostoevsky's art Or, Dostoevsky can be shown to have unwittingly served scientific materialism when, in fact, he was deeply anxious precisely about the possibility that science, based on positivism and materialism, would inevitably lead to a world without religious faith and hence to the degeneration of moral values. Promoting their own philosophical and ideological projects, these interpreters do a disservice both to Einstein, by distorting the nature of his scientific discoveries, and to Dostoevsky, who could convert even the apparently unpromising ideas of science and mathematics into poetic structures.

These interpretations bespeak a failure to take seriously the poetic status of Dostoevsky's work and to relate the novel's scientific motifs to its own artistic system. As Pomorska says, "it is only by disclosing all the elements of equivalence, that is, the symbolic system in prose, that we can grasp its deeper dimension".¹⁴ Ivan's discourses, as I attempted to show, have little to do with geometry per se, whether Euclidean or non-Euclidean. Ivan uses the historical discovery of non-Euclidean geometry as a rhetorical maneuver in an artistically rendered temptational discourse. On a deeper level, his conjuring up of an incomprehensible non-Euclidean geometry becomes a symbol for the predicament of modern humanity which faces alone a frightening, utterly impersonal material universe. Symbolic analysis suggests that the whole drift of The Brothers Karamazov affirms the urgent necessity for "another non-Euclidean consciousness" not in order to erect a "bridge to the great discoveries in physics" of the twentieth century, but to restore the human bond with the divine. Dostoevsky's last novel puts the question whether there are any "conditions" for morality without faith in God and immortality, and answers it in the negative. For Dostoevsky, morality was grounded on his Christian ideal which a relentlessly secularized science was in the process of destroying. It was that ideal which guided his Weltanschauung and inspired him to write a work which, in Frank's words, "comes closer than any work at the end of the century to fulfilling [Dostoevsky's] prophecy of a great masterpiece of Christian art", The Divine Comedy."¹⁵

NOTES

Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics, London, 1937, p. 336.
Nicholas Lobachevsky, Geometrical Researches on the Theory of Parallels, translated by Dr. George Bruce Halsted, p 11, in Roberto Bonola, Non-Euclidean Geometry, New York, 1955.
Halsted, pp. 7-8.
Strakhov "had studied mathematics and natural science and had taken an advanced university degree in biology. Such qualifications gave him a scientific competence far superior to the average Russian publicist". Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky, The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865, Princeton, 1986, pp. 39-40.
E. I. Kijko, "Vosprijatie Dostoevskim neevklidovoj geometrii", Dostoevskij, Materialy i issledovanija, 6, Leningrad 1985, 120-128. My references to this article are indicated by page numbers in parentheses at the end of sentences.
Alexander Moszkowsky, Conversations with Einstein, translated by Henry L. Brose, Introduction by Henry Le Roy Finch, Foreword by C. P. Snow, new York, 1972, p. 185. The English version has: "Dostojewski gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss!" See also the German edition: "mir gibt Dostojewski mehr als irgend ein Wissenschaftler, mehr als Gauss!" Alexander Moszkowsky, Einstein, Einblicke in seine Gedankenwelt, Entwickelt aus Gesprachen mil Einstein, Hamburg/Berlin, 1921, p. 185.
According to Ronald Clark, Moszkowsky was "a Berlin literateur and critic who moved on the fringe of the Einstein circle". Ronald Clark, Einstein, New York, p. 240.
Max Born, The Born-Einstein Letters, Correspondence between Albert Einstein and Max and Hedwig Bom from 1916 to 1955 with Commentaries by Max Born, translated by Irene Born, New York, 1971. The Moszkowsky episode is covered on pp. 37-51 from which my citations are taken.
Boris Kuznetsov, Einstein and Dostoevsky, translated by Valdimir Talmy, Moscow and London, 1972. Page numbers of phrases quoted from this book are indicated in parentheses at the end of sentences.
Grigorij Pomeranc, "Evklidovskij" i "neèvklidovskij" razum v tvorcestve Dostoevskogo, Kontinent, 3, 1975, 109-50. Pomerants cites Einstein as saying: "Dostoevskij dal mne mnogo, neobycajno mnogo, bol'še čem Gaussa". My citations from Pomerants' article are taken from pp. 125-26.
See C. P. Snow's Foreword in Alexander Moszkowsky. Conversations With Einstein, New York, 1972, p. vii, and C. P. Snow, Variety of Men, Penguin Books, 1969, where Snow writes: "The novel he valued most of all was The Brothers Karamazov'", p. 99. See also Abraham Pais, 'Subtle is the Lord...', The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford/New York, 1982, p. 16.
Moszkowsky, pp. 184, 186-87. See pp. 185, 187 of the original German edition.
See, for example. Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein, London, 1973; Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years, London, 1974; and Albert Einstein, The Human Side, New Glimpses from his Archives Selected and Edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffmann, Princeton, 1979.
Krystyna Pomorska, "Poetics of Prose", 169-177, (p. 173), in Roman Jakobson, Verbal An, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time, edited by Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1985.
Joseph Frank, p. 198.

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