goes just a step further towards what he refrains from saying, ‘God is dead, everything is interdiction’.

There is just one small word between that formulation and the Bakhtinian/ Dostoevskean text. The ideological struggle amongst the Karamazovs revolves on a much more tentative formulation: ‘If God is dead, everything is allowed’.30 That ‘if’ is precisely what is at stake here. Living on the threshold of a secularized civilization, Dostoevsky himself was surely aware of the need for ethical grounding: the removal of the ultimate narrator, the unmooring of the subject, and the uncoupling of ethics from metaphysics has left an impossible legacy for the following century.