I Am A Scoundrel

When Ivan gets into the carriage to leave Fyodor Pavlovitch's house, he tells his coachman: "I am going to Tchermashnya."

He doesn't go to Tchermashnya. He gets to the station, stares at the road, orders horses, then abruptly changes his mind and takes the train to Moscow instead. He even sends a message back to his father: "I haven't gone to Tchermashnya."

But why did he say it to the coachman?

In the carriage, moments before, Smerdyakov had arranged the rug around his legs and said: "It's a true saying, that it's always worth while speaking to a clever man." It was a code. Fyodor Pavlovitch had told Smerdyakov to signal him by knocking on the window in a certain way if Grushenka came. Ivan's departure was the condition Smerdyakov needed. Someone would be absent. The usual guards would be down.

"I am going to Tchermashnya" meant: I know what you're planning, and I am leaving.

All night on the train, Ivan brooded. By dawn, approaching Moscow: "I am a scoundrel."

He doesn't say "I made a mistake." He doesn't say "I should have warned Father." He says: I am a scoundrel. The name for the thing he is.

This is the inflection point of Ivan's story, and it's buried in a subordinate clause during a travel scene. Dostoevsky gives it one sentence. The train was flying on, and only at daybreak did he rouse himself, and whispered to himself: I am a scoundrel.

Ivan knows. He is not ignorant. He is not deceived. He articulated the complete philosophical case against his father's murder in the tavern speech — "one reptile will devour the other" — and he knows that speech was his genuine feeling. He left. He let it happen. He is a scoundrel.

Compare this to the Mysterious Visitor, who committed actual murder and spent fourteen years in anguish before confessing. The Mysterious Visitor was tortured. Ivan says "I am a scoundrel" and continues to Moscow.

What does Ivan do with the knowledge?

He sits with it. He holds it as a philosophical proposition: yes, this is true, I am what I am, I know it. This is the pattern of his entire character. He can construct the most devastating argument against God's creation and then turn around and say "I accept God, I just return the ticket." He can know himself a scoundrel and continue on the train.

The Underground Man does this too, and he names it: "consciousness is a disease." The more you understand, the less you can do. Ivan's super-abundant consciousness is his paralysis. He sees everything and moves nowhere.

Zossima, at the duel, had a simpler mechanism. He beat Afanasy. He woke up, saw it clearly, felt the shame immediately as a physical thing — "as though a sharp dagger had pierced me right through." He went and bowed down to the floor before the orderly. Then he went to the duel and threw the pistol in the woods.

The gap between knowing and acting was, for Zossima, minutes.

For Ivan it is the rest of the novel.

This is Dostoevsky's central question about consciousness: is the seeing of one's own wrongness enough? Ivan says it is sufficient to know. Zossima says it is the beginning of acting. The dagger pierces and you move. The train flies on.

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