Dostoevsky. Brothers Karamazov.

"It's not God that I [Ivan Karamazov] do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God's, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept. With one reservation: I have a childlike conviction that the sufferings will be healed and smoothed over, that the whole offensive comedy of human contradictions will disappear like a pitiful mirage, a vile concoction of man's Euclidean mind, feeble and puny as an atom, and that ultimately, at the world's finale, in the moment of eternal harmony, there will occur and be revealed something so precious that it will suffice for all hearts, to allay all indignation, to redeem all human villainy, all bloodshed; it will suffice not only to make forgiveness possible, but also to justify everything that has happened with me--let this, let all of this come true and be revealed, but I do not accept it and do not want to accept it!" (p. 235-36)

"We have our historical, direct, and intimate delight in the torture of beating. Nekrasov has a poem describing a peasant flogging a horse on its eyes with a knout, 'on its meek eyes.' We've all seen that; that is Russianism. He describes a weak nag, harnessed with too heavy a load, that gets stuck in the mud with her cart and is unable to pull it out. The peasant beats her, beats her savagely, beats her finally not knowing what he's doing; drunk with beating, he flogs her painfully, repeatedly: 'Pull, though you have no strength, pull, though you die!' The little nag strains, and now he begins flogging her, flogging the defenseless creature on her weeping, her 'meek eyes.' Beside herself, she strains and pulls the cart out, trembling all over, not breathing, moving somehow sideways, with a sort of skipping motion, somehow unnaturally and shamefully--it's horrible in Nekrasov. But that's only a horse; God gave us horses so that we could flog them. So the Tartars instructed us, and they left us the knout as a reminder. But peoople, too, can be flogged. And so, an intelligent, educated gentleman and his lady flog their own daughter, a child of seven, with a birch--I [Ivan] have it written down in detail. The papa is glad that the birch is covered with little twigs, 'it will smart more,' he says, and so he starts 'smarting' his own daughter. I know for certain that there are floggers who get more excited with every stroke, to the point of sensuality, literal sensuality, more and more, progressively, with each new stroke. They flog for one minute, they flog for five minutes, they flog for ten minutes--longer, harder, faster, sharper. The child is crying, the child finally cannot cry, she has no breath left: 'Papa, papa, dear papa!'" (pp. 241-42)

"In my opinion, there is no need to destroy anything, one need only destroy the idea of God in mankind, that's where the business should start! One should begin with that, with that--oh, blind men, of no understanding! Once mankind has renounced God, one and all ..., then the entire old world view will fall of itself, without anthropophagy, and, above all, the entire former morality, and everything will be new. People will come together in order to take from life all that it can give, but, of course, for happiness and joy in this world only. Man will be exalted with the spirit of divine, titanic pride, and the man-god will appear. Man, his will and his science no longer limited, conquering nature every hour, will thereby every hour experience such lofty delight as will replace for him all his former hopes of heavenly delight. Each will know himself utterly mortal, without resurrection, and will accept death proudly and calmly, like a god. Out of pride he will understand that he should not murmur against the momentariness of life, and he will love his brother then without any reward. Love will satisfy only the moment of life, but the very awareness of its momentariness will increase its fire..." (pp. 648-49)

"The elder of the two [brothers, Ivan] is one of our modern young men, brilliantly educated, with quite a powerful mind, how, however, no longer believes in anything, who has already scrapped and rejected much, too much in life..." (p. 606).

"[W]e are of a broad, Karamzovian nature ... capable of containing all possible opposites and of contemplating both abysses at once, the abyss above us, and abyss of lofty ideals, and the abyss beneath us, an abyss of the lowest and foulest degradation" (p. 699).

"And so we shall part, gentlemen. Let us agree here, by Ilyusha's stone, that we will never forget--first, Ilyushechka, and second, one another. And whatever may happen to us later in life, even if we do not meet for twenty years afterwards, let us always remember how we buried the poor boy, whom we once threw stones at--remember, there by the little bridge?--and whom afterwards we all came to love so much. He was a nice boy, a kind and brave boy, he felt honor and his father's bitter offense made him rise up. And so, first of all, let us remember him, gentlemen, all our lives. And even though we may be involved with the most important affairs, achieve distinction or fall into some great misfortune--all the same, let us never forget how good we once felt here, all together, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, for the time that we loved the poor boy, perhaps better than we actually are." (Fydor Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov. Transl. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. North Point Press, 1990, p. 774.)

(I thought this novel was interminable, exasperating, and finally magnificent. No more a murder mystery than is Hamlet, it asks all the big questions, and its greatness lies in its refusal to answer them. Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation breathes new, inspired life into the text, and Dostoevsky's passionate, compassionate eye -- on his way to his son's burial, a father bends down to retrieve a flower that has fallen on the snow -- sees and embraces everything. If it's true, as someone once wrote, that reading only begins with rereading, let reading begin here! In the shadow of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, practically everything written in the 20th century, with the possible exception of Faulkner, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, read like sketches, drawing room exercises. But then, if you can't see anything past your own doorstep, what else is there to write about, besides alcoholics ripping electrical wire out of houses in order to pay for another shot of booze?)