The delirious & the divine

Dostoevsky’s Language of Epiphany

How does one express the inexpressible? Authors who have tackled the problem of epiphany have time and time again been faced with this conundrum. A sudden flash of insight, a moment of instant clarity, a second of unity with a divine and transcendent being: such are experiences that are uniquely human, and yet are uniquely impossible to relate fully. As a result, authors such as James Joyce, St. John of the Cross, and Rumi have resorted to the application of a specific vocabulary to frame the experience, to make it understandable and communicable on a metaphorical level to the reader. We see these metaphorical languages employed in epiphanic literature such as the language of love used in the Biblical Song of Songs, or that of light and dark as used in the Cloud of Unknowing. However, these are not the only metaphorical languages available to the author. The nineteenth century novelist, Fyodor Dostoesky, employs a particular language to express a type of epiphany experienced by many of his characters. Although The Possessed, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov are usually discussed for their exploration of issues of religion, nationalism, and free will, they also have much to share on the subject of the epiphanic experience.

Dostoevsky’s characters experience one of two kinds of epiphany. The first may be a touch of the divine, an external intervention in the character’s world that brings a new and deep religious awakening. However, this type of epiphany is not as common in his novels as a more personal epiphany, a turning point in the character’s journey at which time something deeply internal, even unconscious, is brought to light. This crucial insight informs the character for the first time of their own nature or intentions, and a special language is required to inform both reader and character that something unusual, pivotal, and important is going on. As such, the language which Dostoevsky uses to describe a personal, insightful and fully secular epiphany, is quite different than that used in a relation of a religious epiphany, the traditionally understood union between the human and the divine, the single soul and the universal.

The concept of the eternal or infinite as an experience available to the human is central to the idea of religious epiphany itself. In this world, humans can unite with the divine, and feel the full force of its presence. This idea is not only to be found in religious epiphanic literature, but is also expressed in The Possessed by the Kirilov, a radical atheist who struggles with the concept of the existence of God and free will. Kirilov’s statement that an eternal life does not belong solely to the future, but is accessible in the present in human moments “when time suddenly stops and becomes eternal” (p.233), might also ring true for John of the Cross or the author of the Cloud of Unknowing:

“There are seconds – they come five or six at a time – when you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony in all its perfection. It’s not of this earth; I don’t men by that that it’s something heavenly but only that man, as he is constituted on earth, can’t endure it. He must be either physically transformed or die. It is a clear, unmistakable sensation. It is as though you were suddenly in contact with the whole of nature, and you say, ‘Yes, this is the truth.’” (Kirilov, The Possessed, 609)

“[T]he presence of eternal harmony in all its perfection” is, for Kirilov, an unearthly presence, and unendurable for human beings. However, this unearthly epiphany is observable again in Dostoevsky’s later work, The Brothers Karamazov; this time, it is the devout Alyosha who feels “in contact with the whole of nature”, face to face with the truth. Alyosha’s vision, following a dream in which he is present with Christ at the wedding in Galilee, uses this same type of language to express the divine or eternal intervention in the human world:

Filled with rapture, his soul yearned for freedom, space, vastness… The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens, the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars… Alyosha stood gazing and suddenly, as if he had been cut down, threw himself to the earth.

He did not know why he was embracing it, he did not try to understand why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss all of it … in his rapture he wept even for the stars that shone on him from the abyss, and ‘he was not ashamed of this ecstasy.’ It was as if threads from all those innumerable worlds of God all came together in his soul, and it was trembling all over, ‘touching other worlds.’… But with each moment he felt clearly and almost tangibly something as firm and immovable as this heavenly vault descend into his soul. Some sort of idea, as it were, was coming to reign in his mind… He fell to the earth a weak youth and rose up a fighter, steadfast for the rest of his life, and he knew it and felt it suddenly, in that very moment of his ecstasy. Never, never in all his life would Alyosha forget that moment. “Someone visited my soul in that hour,” he would say afterwards… (The Brothers Karamazov 362-363).

This “rapture” and “ecstasy” that Alyosha feels as he touches “other worlds” and “the mystery of the stars” have a strong effect on the little monk; he immediately leaves his monastery and goes into the world a changed man. Thus we see an epiphanic moment in Dostoevsky in which a character is touched by something external, feels united with something divine and indescribable, and is forever changed by this experience. It is also important to note that Dostoevksy’s choice of words when dealing with this indescribable subject is a language of light and universality –a recognizable language of religious epiphany.

There is, however, another type of epiphany experienced by Dostoevsky’s characters, yet one which is not associated with a religious or harmonious touch. Rather, this secular epiphany in Dostoevsky describes the bringing to light of a deeply internal concept in a unique way. This idea is again described by Kirilov in The Possessed:

“There are many thoughts that have been there all the time but suddenly feel new...There are many things I see now as though for the first time.” (223)

These thoughts may be motivations or ideas, so profoundly hidden within the character that he or she is completely unconscious of them. Consequently, when the epiphany occurs, the character gains an insight into his own nature that was unavailable to him before. This new insight changes the character in a fundamental way and may effect a drastic change in his characterization in the novel, usually signified through his subsequent actions or choices.

The sources of the secular epiphany are, paradoxically, simultaneously internal and external: although the new information comes from inside the character, it is still foreign to the character, and confronts him as something external and other. It is in this way that Ivan Karamazov finds himself face to face with the Devil, a hallucination that he describes as “not dreams, but reality” (The Brothers Karamazov 652). Ivan recognizes his hallucination as the manifestation of something internal and unknown:

“… he – is me, Alyosha, me myself. All that’s low, all that’s mean and contemptible in me … by the way, he told me a great deal that’s true about myself. I would never have said it to myself… you know, … I would much prefer that he were really he and not I! 652, 654)

Ivan’s hallucination will be discussed below in more detail, but it is important to note the relationship between the internal which is externalized and the character it confronts.

In the case of the religious epiphany, the character has minimal control over the situation: he is touched, he is a passive recipient of a divine and cosmic understanding, and although he feels connected to the universe he did not effect the connection. In the case of a secular epiphany, however, the trigger is not so clear; as the character is the sole participant, he must be both active initiator and passive recipient at once. If this were true, however, nothing would stop the character from a constant barrage of epiphanic experiences. Clearly these personal epiphanic moments are few and far between. So it remains to be seen what circumstances bring the eternal to light in a personal, secular epiphany.

The characters in Dostoevsky’s novels are forever suffering from some sort of illness; characters are constantly feverish, trembling, or wild eyed about something, and may even become delirious. However, I do not believe this to be a true physical representation, or a normal representation of everyday life in nineteenth century Russia. Rather, this constant sickness indicates the use of the language of illness as a metaphor, a metaphor which - I believe - is employed to give context to the experience of personal epiphany. While a language of light and universal harmony describe the religious epiphanic experience, Dostoevksy chooses a language of illness and delirium to frame the moments of personal epiphany, in which the internal is brought to light.

For example, the illness of epilepsy is clearly identified with epiphanic experience. When Kirilov explains his sensation of “eternal harmony”, his friend replies that he is sure to become an epileptic:

I’ve heard that’s how epilepsy begins. An epileptic described to me exactly what it feels like just before a fit. It’s just like what you said: five seconds, and he felt it was impossible to endure it any longer. Remember Mohammed’s pitcher from which not a drop was spilled while he flew around paradise on his steed. That pitcher – that’s your five seconds. It’s too much like that harmony of yours. And, you know, Mohammed was an epileptic. So watch out, Kirilov, it’s epilepsy!” (The Possessed 610)

This speech is strangely prophetic, as Kirilov does fall into some kind of epileptic fit just prior to his suicide; he becomes catatonic, uncannily pale and rigid, staring “into some point in space” (642), and then, resolving his lifelong questions of free will and religion, pulls the trigger. This bizarre momentary epilepsy also afflicts Ivan Karamazov after a cryptic exchange with Smerdyakov:

“Something strange happened: all of a sudden, as if in a convulsion…Anyone seeing his face would certainly have concluded that he was not laughing at all out of merriment. And for the life of him he himself could not have explained what was happening to him at that moment. He moved and walked as if in spasms.” (The Brothers Karamazov 273, 274)

This particular discussion between Ivan and Smerdyakov proves to have profound influence over the course of the novel; as a result of this scene, Ivan’s father is murdered.

Illness in general is identified with the epiphanic experience through dreams and delirium. It is these elements which form the crucial frame for the Dostoevskian secular epiphany, as it is always during a feverish illness that the character has a dream which fully reveals an inner truth. These dreams are carefully crafted and described by the author, and each holds a specific meaning for the character involved. One must exercise some restraint when trying to ‘read’ these dreams; in our post-Freudian world, it is all too easy to commit an historical anachronism by performing a psychoanalysis of each dream. However, it is undeniable that dreamscapes which each character visits while ill provides an externalization of something deeply internal, thus following the paradoxical form of the secular epiphany, and the realization that these dreams bring to each character effect an important transition in their lives.

Why should these epiphanic deliriums appear only to the ill? According to Dostoevsky, there is something unusual about the dreams of the ill that alone permits the epiphanic experience:

“A sick man’s dreams are often extraordinarily distinct and vivid and extremely life-like. A scene may be composed of the most unnatural and incongruous elements, but the setting and presentation are so plausible, the details so subtle, so unexpected, so artistically in harmony with the whole picture, that the dreamer could not invent them for himself in his waking state, even if he were an artist… Such morbid dreams always make a strong impression on the dreamer’s already disturbed and excited nerves, and are remembered for a long time.” (Crime and Punishment 51)

Sickbed dreams thus provide a state of not only altered but also hyper-reality; the dreamer has difficulty discerning if he is awake or asleep. But this blurring of the real and the dream does not indicate an absence of reality, but rather a clarification of reality, as it is during this experience that the character gains a glimpse of his inner self. This idea is also articulated by the Devil in The Brothers Karamazov, who clearly states his role as a figment of Ivan’s brain-fever-plagued imagination:

“Though I am your hallucination, even so, as in a nightmare, I say original things, such as have never entered your head before, so that I’m not repeating your thoughts at all, and yet I am merely your nightmare and nothing more.” (369)

These epiphanic dreams are clearly specific to illness; such depths of insight cannot be attained while in a waking state or even in a healthy state. In fact, illness, Dostoevsky suggests, is the only way of achieving the secular epiphanic plane:

“What do people usually say? … ‘You are sick and so what you think you see is nothing more than the unreal dream of your feverish mind.’ But you know, that is not strictly logical. I agree that ghosts appear only to the sick but that proves only that they cannot appear to anybody else… Apparitions are, so to speak, shreds and fragments of other worlds, the first beginnings of them. There is no reason why a healthy man should see them, because a healthy man is mainly a being of this earth … But as soon as he falls ill, as soon as the normal earthly state of the organism is disturbed, the possibility of another world begins to appear, and as the illness increases, so do the contacts with the other world, so that at the moment of a man’s death he enters fully into that world…” (–Svidrigaylov, Crime and Punishment 277)

Thus the character’s illness provides a state in which epiphanic dreams may arise, dreams which present pictures that the dreamer could not create in a waking state, yet which hold a truth that confronts the dreamer in an unusual and even uncomfortable way. Illness is therefore necessary if one wishes the ability to confront externalized visions of the deeply internal, and experience an epiphany. For it is only when one is extremely ill do the fragments from that ‘other world’, the world of the deeply unconscious, break through into the conscious mind.

Examples of epiphany through dream or delirium abound in the Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, two of Dostoevsky’s most famous novels and, as the above indicates, illness is the only way in which these characters are able to experience their secular epiphanies. In each circumstance, the epiphany follows a plain pattern: the character becomes extremely ill, the character experiences a meaningful dream or hallucination that he has trouble discerning from reality, the character awakes, the character is changed by the experience, and the character is inspired to take a new direction, to solve an old problem, or to act – sometimes outrageously. These patterns of epiphany are clearly observable in the stories of four Dostoevskian characters: Raskolnikov and Svidrigaylov from Crime and Punishment, and Dmitri and Ivan from The Brothers Karamazov.

Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov is a poor student tortured by a strange idea. Basically, he sees the world as populated by two types of people, those who are natural leaders and those who are not, and believes that those who are leaders are not subject to moral or ethical codes that may stand in the way of their great achievements. However, unconvinced of the veracity of his idea, he decides to kill an old and disagreeable woman, believing that if he indeed is one of these extraordinary men, he should have no problems in overstepping moral boundaries. His ideal turns out to be a failure; he is consumed by his own guilt and intellectual conflict, and finally confesses his crime. However, Raskolnikov experiences two meaningful dreams during the course of the story. Both dreams occur during a fever, display a heightened and disturbing reality, and reveal hidden knowledge that influences his later decisions.

The first epiphanic experience occurs before the murder, when Raskolnikov is suddenly overcome with exhaustion and illness: “His nervous shudderings seemed to have turned into a fever; he even felt chilly; in that terrible heat he was cold” (50). In his dream, a little boy watches as a peasant beats his old mare to death, inflicting an unjust punishment in a drunken rage, claiming his right as the horse’s owner to justify his actions. The child cries out in alarm, and even rushes to save the poor creature, but in vain. The horse lies dead on the ground, and Raskolnikov awakes, “his mind dark and confused”(57), “shaking like a leaf” (57) and wondering if his fever is responsible for such an awful vision (57).

The dream is described in considerable detail, and is so brutal and frightening that it is often difficult to read. And yet the dream is clearly epiphanic in a secular sense, as it symbolically brings up many issues about the planned murder, issues that Raskolnikov has not yet thought through. Remembering the sticky blood in his dream, he is suddenly struck with the physical aspects of his crime, and wonders amazèdly at the gore he is to produce (57). He also identifies strongly with the child in the scene, the child whose sense of justice is profoundly upset as he watches the horse die. The reader and Raskolnikov alike are disgusted by the peasant Mikolka, who claims, “She’s mine, isn’t she? I can do what I like with my own” (54): a crucial point, considering that the crux of the story is Raskolnikov’s theory, that some people are above moral, ethical or legal codes of conduct. The fact that Raskolnikov is so repulsed by this reversal of justice shows that he is unable to consider ethical or moral boundaries ‘canceled’ under any circumstance. Therefore, the dream suggests that should he go through with the murder, it would be his psychological ruin.

Because of this dream, Raskolnikov consciously decides not to murder the old woman, but later takes advantage of good timing and goes through with the crime. It does, as the dream promises, turn out to be his ruin. Throughout the course of the book, he is plagued by his crime, and eventually turns himself in. He is sentenced to several years in prison, and is sent to Siberia to serve his sentence. It is during this period that he dreams his second epiphanic dream. Again, he falls seriously ill, this time, the book suggests, because “he did not feel remorse for his crime” (250). The dream is similarly realistic and disturbing:

When he began to recover he remembered the dreams that had visited him while he lay in his fever and delirium. He had dreamt in his illness that the whole world was condemned to fall victim to a terrible, unknown pestilence which was moving on Europe out of the depths of Asia. All were destined to perish, except a chosen few, a very few. There had appeared a new strain of trichinae, microscopic creatures parasitic in men’s bodies. But these creatures were endowed with intelligence and will. People who were infected immediately became like men possessed and out of their minds. But never, never, had any men thought themselves so wise and so unshakable in the truth as those who were attacked. Never had they considered their judgements, their scientific deductions, or their moral convictions and creeds more infallible. Whole communities, whole cities and nations, were infected and went mad. All were full of anxiety, and none could understand any other; each thought he was the sole repository of truth … Men killed one another in senseless rage… All things and all men were perishing. (523-4)

Raskolnikov’s second dream finally reveals to him the falsity of his ideal. It demonstrates what would happen should all men think as he did, should all consider themselves the supermen and their peers less than equal, should all men become Mikolkas and treat their neighbours as their “property”. It is after this dream that Raskolnikov manages to deal with his crime and the disturbed thoughts that lead him to it. He puts away his past and embraces life in a new manner. So dramatic is his turnaround after this simple dream that the situation is compared to the raising of Lazarus.

Aside from Raskolnikov’s life-changing epiphanies, one other character in Crime and Punishment experiences deliriums which reveal the state of his inner soul. This character is Svidrigaylov, the sinister womanizer who is used to getting everything and everyone he wants. Svidrigaylov delights in raping his young governesses, and it is to his great surprise that he falls in love with one of them. When she finally rejects him, threatening him with a gun and even attempting to take his life, Svidrigaylov’s world crumbles around him. He is shaken with “a sudden tremor” (485) and “feverish trembling” (486), and goes to bed “shaking with feverish chill” (486). But he does not go to sleep. “He did not think of anything, and did not wish to think; but dreams and fragmentary ideas without beginning or end, or any coherence, rose before him one after another” (486). Indeed, the sequence of Svidrigaylov’s dreams at this point in the novel are so confused with reality that the reader hardly knows whether he is sleeping or waking.

Svidrigaylov’s dreams are also disturbing. First of all, he believes there is a mouse in his bed which eludes his catching, running all over his body. Then, he sees a girl that he once knew, a suicide, dead and dressed in white in her coffin, with a smile on her lips “full of infinite, unchildlike grief and immense bitterness” (487). She has been heartbroken and “wounded by the outrage that had amazed and horrified her young childish conscience … with unmerited shame”(487): presumably, Svidrigaylov “knew her” (487) in more than one sense. Finally, Svidrigaylov sees a five year-old girl on the street, shivering in the rain, and puts her to sleep in his bed. As he watches, however, her face transforms into “corruption, … the brazen face of a mercenary French harlot” (489), and she spreads her arms out to him in an open invitation.

These dreams may seem confusing, but they are all based on a common theme: Svidrigaylov’s ruinous philosophy of life. He is tortured with metaphorical visions of what his life has been and what suffering his devil-may-care attitude has brought to the innocent, and is as unable to shake the nagging of his awakening conscience as he is unable to catch the invisible mouse which plagues him. Through such visions of innocence corrupted, Svidrigaylov is finally forced to face his inner, hidden shame. The epiphany proves too much for him: he leaves a brief note on his table, walks out onto a misty bridge, puts a gun to his temple, and takes his own life.

Dostoevsky’s last book, The Brothers Karamazov, tells of three brothers, all of whom are extremely different. We have already met Alyosha, the youngest, who is the only character to have experienced a true religious epiphany. Dmitri, the eldest of the three Karamazov brothers, stands in marked contrast to the patient Alyosha as one who lives by his passions. He blows hot and cold from one minute to the next, and spends most of the novel issuing passionate exclamations and behaving in a self-indulgent fashion. However, at one point in the novel, it appears he is having an epiphany. Leaving a murdered man behind at his father’s estate, he winds up in a drunken and orgiastic revelry with the object of his desire, and finds himself “incoherent, disconnected, feverish…” (433). In fact, the entire chapter that details this impromptu party is entitled “Delirium”. At one moment, Dmitri finds himself briefly alone, and a pseudo-epiphany takes place:

Mitya’s head was burning… His scattered thoughts suddenly came together, his sensations merged, and the result of it all was light. A terrible, awful light! ‘If I’m going to shoot myself, what better time than now?’ (436)

Yet Mitya is blown away from this thought by his passions, and is arrested for the murder of his father minutes later, before he can take his own life.

It would appear that this moment is an epiphany of sorts; Dostoevsky uses the language of light to describe the cosmic unity of thoughts central to the imagery in a religious epiphanic experience. Yet this epiphany does not produce a lasting change in Dmitri’s character. Had he truly been touched by the divine, he would have paid close attention to the epiphanic message. But this scattered epiphany blends the peripheral elements of the secular and sacred without their substance; Dmitri is not united with an external being, and is not told something about his character or motivations in a dream sequence of any import. The experience is essentially meaningless, and it is not surprising that Dmitri moves quickly from this train of thought off into another direction, remaining true to his previous character in a manner impossible to someone who has experienced a true epiphany.

I believe, however, that Dmitri does have a secular epiphanic experience, one that does effect a change in his character. The dream in which the message is relayed is not expressed directly in the novel, yet given our discussion of illness and epiphany, the circumstances seem to demand its taking place. The posited delirium takes place at the end of the novel, after Dmitri is tried and falsely convicted of his father’s murder. The book hints that an event has taken place, something painful, memorable, and absorbing, experienced in the throes of illness:

Two days after the decision of the court, [Mitya] had come down with nervous fever…Generally, since the day of the trial, he had become terribly pensive. Sometimes he would be silent for half an hour, apparently thinking ponderously and painfully about something… (762)

After his recovery, the reader witnesses a dramatically different Dmitri. He talks soberly of leaving for America, where he intends to work the land laboriously and teach himself English, then returning to Russia, where he intends to live an anonymous peasant’s life in on a remote farm. This Dmitri stands in marked contrast to the self-aggrandizing, melodramatic, self-centered Dmitri at the beginning of the novel. It would appear that, sometime during his post-trail illness, Dmitri experienced something which made him change. Although not related in the text, this experience was clearly a Dostoevskian, personal epiphany.

Although Dmitri’s epiphanic experience takes place ‘off stage’, his brother, Ivan, experiences a dramatic epiphany clearly related in the text. Throughout The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan displays an atheist philosophy. Declaring that ‘everything is permissible’, he rails against Christianity in his ‘poem’ about a Grand Inquisitor, and is callous and suave in everything he does. This changes, however, after learning from Smerdyakov that he is responsible for his father’s murder. Although he decides to tell the court about his guilt at Dmitri’s trial the next day, we see him later in his room, “precisely just on the verge of brain fever, which finally took complete possession of his organism … so he was sitting there now, almost aware of being delirious..” (634-635). It gradually becomes clear that Ivan is not alone in the room. The scene which follows is an odd discussion between Ivan and his hallucination, the Devil.

There are three important ideas to note about Ivan’s delirious scene. First of all, the Devil’s presence is epiphanic in a secular sense. Through discussion and frustrating questioning, the Devil systematically destroys Ivan’s grand theories of the world by widening the holes which Ivan has so far tried to ignore. Jeering and poking fun at Ivan’s confusion, he challenges the profound atheism so central to Ivan’s self-identity. He also questions Ivan’s motives in confessing to the crime of his father’s murder, which would save his brother from the force of the law:

“Oh you are about to perform a virtuous deed, but you don’t even believe in virtue – that’s what makes you angry and torments you… Why drag yourself there if your sacrifice serves no purpose? Because you yourself don’t know why you’re going! Oh, you’d give a lot to know why you’re going! And do you think you’ve really decided?” --Ivan, quoting the devil, 653, 654.

Exposing Ivan’s real intentions, motives, and fears, the Devil becomes the delirium through which the personal epiphany is effected. He reduces Ivan to madness as he fumbles for a reply, crying, “I can’t bear such questions! Who dares ask me such questions!” (654).

Secondly, although the personage through which Ivan’s internal turmoil is made external is a divine figure of sorts, this is not a theophany: it is made clear that the Devil is a product of Ivan’s diseased mind, a part of Ivan and not anything independent and/or divine:

“You are my hallucination. You are the embodiment of myself, but of just one side of me … of my thoughts and feelings, but only the most loathsome and stupid of them.” (637)

Ivan goes through considerable difficulty as he tries to convince himself aloud that his hallucination is a figment of his delirium and no more. He tries “with all his might not to believe in his delirium and not to fall into complete insanity.” (640), and repeats phrases like, “of course I am delirious … because it is I, I myself who am talking, and not you!” (637) to the Devil. Indeed, it is he who is talking, but his inner turmoil finds expression through the medium of his impertinent hallucination.

Thirdly, although Ivan is convinced that the Devil is a hallucination, there is no denying that he brings up important issues from within Ivan’s troubled psyche, and presents him with questions that he has hitherto avoided. In fact, in spite of being a part of Ivan, the Devil also operates as a separate entity. After his departure from the room, Ivan insists, “[The devil] said it to me about myself, and he knows what he’s saying…” (653), while Alyosha tries to convince him otherwise: “You are saying it, not him!… and you’re saying it because you’re sick, delirious, tormenting yourself!” (653). Ivan does not attribute the Devil’s words as his own, although he clearly realizes the impact they have had on his situation. So the Devil provides an excelled illustration of the paradox of the secular epiphany; he is an external representation of the internal, a separate experience which confronts the character while simultaneously arising from that character’s most profound being.

Ivan’s encounter with the Devil is an epiphanic moment, but it is difficult to witness the change in character that the Devil inspires. Clearly, he learns true things about himself that he would otherwise never have known or explored, and is reduced from a swaggering atheist to a terrified man in the course of the interview. But it is difficult to judge the long-term effects of his epiphany: Ivan subsequently falls extremely ill, his testimony at Dmitri’s trial is full of delirious rantings, and he is still unconscious with brain fever by the end of the novel, although the assumption is that he will recover. Yet the Devil’s presence caused Ivan to seriously re-examine his most profound philosophical tenants, which caused his mental and personal breakdown. This is perhaps why Alyosha sees Ivan’s illness as

the torments of a proud decision [atheism], a deep conscience.’ God in whom he did not believe and his truth were overcoming his heart, which still did not want to submit. (The Brothers Karamazov, 655.)

It is the presence of the Devil which brings these painful internal conflicts to light. After such a profound and devastating epiphany, Ivan has only two choices: he can follow Svidrigaylov and put a bullet through his brain, or follow Raskolnikov and, Lazarus-like, be raised into a new life.

In the course of this analysis of the Dostoevskian epiphany we have seen the author explore two types of epiphanic experience. The first, the religious experience, is not highly unique in its description or conception; Dostoevsky uses language often associated with the religious epiphany, such as a uniting with the divine and harmonious universal or the dichotomy between light and dark, union and disunion. However, the secular epiphany deals with a complex set of personal issues, a turnaround point in the character’s life in which new insight is brought to light or inner turmoil is dealt with. This secular epiphany is framed in the language of illness. While ill, the character enters a state in which the internal and external collide, and the internal is externalized and brought to life. He is thus brought face to face with elements of internal conflict through his hyper-realistic and memorable dream sequence, and as a result of this epiphany, brings together a resolve and is able to act on it. Time and time again, Dostoevsky’s characters face deep and tumultuous human challenges, and it is through the intervention of the divine or the dreams of the delirious that these challenges are met and resolved.

Bibliography

Beja, Morris. Epiphany in the Modern Novel. Seattle: University of Washington Press,1972.

Breger, Louis. Dostoevsky: The Author as Psychoanalyst. New York: New York University Press, 1989.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. 1880. Trans. Pevear, Richard & Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage Classics, 1990.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. 1866. Trans. Coulson, Jessie. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Possessed. 1871-2. Trans. MacAndrew, Andrew R. New York: Signet Classics, 1962.

Jackson, Robert Louis. The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981.

** Note: I have worked almost exclusively from the three primary texts. This is not because I did not read the other three, nor is it because I was not influenced by them. However, I did not use either Jackson or Breger’s analyses of the dream sequences because, although I found them interesting, I did not necessarily agree with their readings.