The Brothers Karamazov: Bicentennial Edition

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

This idea is not yet resolved in your heart and torments it. But a martyr, too, sometimes likes to toy with his despair, also from despair, as it were. For the time being you, too, are toying, out of despair, with your magazine articles and drawing-room discussions, without believing in your own dialectics and smirking at them with your heart aching inside you … The question is not resolved in you, and there lies your great grief, for it urgently demands resolution …” “But can it be resolved in myself? Resolved in a positive way?” Ivan Fyodorovich continued asking strangely, still looking at the elder with a certain inexplicable smile. “Even if it cannot be resolved in a positive way, it will never be resolved in the negative way either—you yourself know this property of your heart, and therein lies the whole of its torment.