ABSTRACT
If there is no God, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's character Ivan is said to assert in The Brothers Karamazov, then everything is permitted. Dostoyevsky never has Ivan make this statement directly, but it is mentioned several times by several other figures in the novel who report hearing it from the mouth of Ivan. With Ivan's saying that if God is dead everything is lawful, Albert Camus has argued, "the history of contemporary nihilism really begins." Czeslaw Milosz has called The Brothers Karamazov "the most extraordinary philosophical novel in world literature." This praise is probably based in part on what Mikhail Bakhtin has called the "polyphonic" character of Dostoyevsky's novels. Dostoyevsky considered the Enlightenment's strong faith in the natural goodness of man a dangerous fallacy. Man could not be good without the help of God. The emphasis of nineteenth-century intellectuals on unaided reason and science was undermining religious belief and threatened not only Russia but civilization itself.
