"Dostoyevsky shows us that pride and humility are really one. If you are proud, you almost certainly feel humbler than someone else in the world, because pride is an anxiety, not a consolation. And if you are humble, you almost certainly feel better than someone else in the world, because humility is an acheivement, not a freedom. Pride, one might say, is the sin of humble people, and humility is the punishment of proud people; and each reversal represents a kind of self-punishment. Thus Fyodor Karamazov enters the dining room ready to abase himself because he disdains everyone else. This sort of logic is hard to find, at least as an explicit psychology, in novelists before Dostoyevsky. One has instead to consult the religious weepers and gnashers---Ignatius of Loyola, or Kierkegaard---to encounter anything like it."

"Thus the many pairings, or doublings, in which one character revolves around another, and each is murderously dependent on the other. . . .In Fyodor's case---and perhaps it is always the case with any colossal egotism---other people appear to have become himself. He dislikes his neighbor because of something that he, Fyodor, did to him: 'I once played a most shameless, nasty trick on him, and the moment I did it, I immediately hated him for it.' Clearly Fyodor longs---however buried the original religious sentiment---to punish himself, because he hates himself. But since other people have merged with him, he punishes himself by punishing other people, and hates himself by hating other people.
And this leads to a Sisyphean repetition of behavior. Self-punishment of this twisted kind means being condemned to re-enact scandal after scandal without cease, because each self-punishment has become indistinguishable from sinning. The sin itself has become the punishment for that sin, and each sin, being another act of outrage, just opens the wound again."

"But Dostoyevsky's novel enshrines, in its very form, a further argument. It is that Ivan's ideas cannot be refuted by other ideas. In debate, in 'dialogism,' there is no way of defeating or even of matching Ivan, and Alyosha does not really try. At the end of Ivan's legend, he simply kisses his brother. The only way in which we can refute Ivan's ideas, the book seems to say, is by maintaining that Christ is not an idea. Socialism is an idea, because it is 'reasonable'; atheism, too. But Christianity, so profoundly unreasonable---what Kierkegaard called 'lunacy'---is not an idea. The painful part is that the only realm in which Christ is not an idea, in which he is pure knowledge, is in heaven. On earth, we are all fallen, and we fall before ideas, we have only ideas, and Christ can always be kicked around the ideational playground."


-----James Wood, "The Gambler," from The New Republic

Wood Article