employed the figure of Ivan to manifest his hostility to the revolution, but Ropšin accepts on behalf of his own generation Dostoevskii's analysis of the revolution.
Dostoevskii represented the ethico-political alternatives of force and love as religious in character, as the alternatives of unfaith and faith, as the alternatives of murder or suicide on the one hand and life on the other. Ivan and his half-brother Smerdjakov are contrasted with Aliosha. Ivan and Smerdjakov commit parricide; Smerdjakov kills himself; Aliosha is the apostle of life to the young men of his generation.
Ropšin puts Dostoevskii's philosophy into the mouth of Vanja, one of the members of the group:
"Now, tell me, have you ever thought of Christ?"
"Of whom?"
"Of Christ, of the God-Man Christ? Did you ever ask yourself what you ought to believe in and how you ought to live? In my lodgings, in the driver's yard, I often read the Gospels, and I have come to the conclusion that only two ways are open to men, no more than two. One is to believe that everything is permissible. Please, understand me—everything, without exception. Now that leads to the making of such a character as Dostoevskii's Smerdjakov, provided that a man has a mind to dare and not to shrink at any consideration. After all, there is logic in such an attitude: since God does not exist, since Christ is but a man, there is no love as well; there is nothing whatever to stop you. The other is the way of Christ which leads to Christ. Tell me, if there is love in a man's heart—I mean real, deep love—could he kill or not?"
Vanja is a mystic. He feels that his death is drawing near; before death the soul concentrates its energies and looks beyond the limits of sense and of the every-day understanding. There is something more than reason, says Vanja, but we have blinkers on.
George is a rationalist extremist. Just as Ivan extolled Euclidean reasoning, so does George extol arithmetic; like Ivan, he now believes in nothing, neither in God nor in Christ, nor even in the watchword of his party, in the war cry, "Land and liberty!" These for him are mere words. Can fifteen desjatinas of land (he asks in the phrase of Kropotkin) make a man happy? Socialism, he says, is only Martha, and Martha is only half the truth. The other half of truth is Mary—
