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considered as a kind of distinction. It always ransoms
somebody or something. When the torture is endured,
the guilt which caused it is expiated.
Still more: suffering in this world turned upside
down is a temptation. Shatof says to Stavrogin
(Nihilister, i. 320): “Do you know why you made this
low and shameful marriage? ... You married from
a desire to feel pain, pangs of conscience, from moral
luxury. It was a nervous irritation.” And this
conception is not exceptional.
Therefore it is that the extremely significative desire
to live which is purely characteristic of the Byzantine
Christianity becomes the principle of evil with
Dostoyevski. This is what he has mystically embodied in
the three brothers Karamazof. The atheistical Iván
says to his younger brother, “Do you know that if I had
lost my faith in life, ... still I would not have killed
myself, I would live in spite of everything! I have
lifted the enchanted cup to my lips, I shall not let it
go till I have drained it to the dregs.... More than
once I have asked myself if there is a pain in the world
which is able to conquer this unquenchable thirst, this
thirst for life, which, perhaps, is unseemly; but I do not
think that before my thirtieth year any such pain has
been given to me. I know very well that this thirst for
life is what the moralists, especially those who write
verse, the consumptive people, who always have a cold
in the head, call low and contemptible. It is also true
that this thirst for life is a trait which is characteristic
in the Karamazof family: to live! cost what it will!
It is also in you. But what is there low in it!”[1]
Although the thirst for life is an evil, yet suffering,
without something more, is not a good. Dostoyevski,
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