When I was a college freshman, I found myself unable to sleep after reading a press account of a hideous murder. Over a period of three months, 16-year-old Sylvia Likens had been tortured by her caregiver, her caregiver’s children, and various neighborhood youths. She was found starved, dehydrated, covered with open sores, and displaying more than 100 cigarette burns. She had been sexually tortured and humiliated. Her fingernails had been broken backwards. Words had been carved into her skin. At the caregiver’s trial, the prosecutor described these crimes as “the most diabolical case to ever come before a court or jury.”
What haunted me more than the torture was the failure of neighbors who had witnessed some of the abuse to report it. Worst of all, the girl had eventually “lost the will to live.” I had never considered the possibility of such a loss, and I did not think I could go on living as before. Distressed that others did not find these horrors as overwhelming as I did, I eventually discussed them with my Russian literature teacher, the late Michael Holquist. “You have discovered evil,” he told me, and he meant not just the abstract knowledge that evil exists but the soul-wrenching realization that one would never be the same. He added: “Now you are ready to understand Dostoevsky.”
I thought of Sylvia Likens’s death when, after graduating from college, I visited Auschwitz and, again, when I read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s account of the Gulag. And I thought of it on October 7, 2023. By then, I was not so much amazed by the sexual torture and the murder of children, but by the fact that Hamas fighters filmed the events and boasted about them. They indulged in the same theatrical display when returning the bodies of the Bibas children in February 2025, whom they had strangled to death. What went through the mind of the strangler? Did four-year-old Ariel understand what was happening to him? Did he experience what Dostoevsky called “mortal terror”? Was he taunted before being murdered? Was he made the star actor in a ritual murder?
“The Russian soul is a dark place,” Prince Myshkin reflects in Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot. In The Brothers Karamazov, the greatest novel about good and evil, Ivan, the intellectual brother, makes clear that such darkness is within us all. Ivan cannot come to terms with human cruelty, especially when inflicted on children. In the chapter called “The Brothers Make Friends,” Ivan and his pious brother, Alyosha, who have grown up apart and barely know each other, have met to get acquainted in what Ivan describes as a characteristically Russian way: by disclosing their deepest philosophical beliefs about “the eternal questions, of the existence of God and immortality.” Alyosha expects Ivan, a student of natural science, to defend materialism and atheism. But Ivan is a much deeper thinker than that.
Ivan is torn between two irreconcilable beliefs. On the one hand, as a materialist who rejects anything beyond the laws of nature, he regards moral norms as arbitrary social conventions with no real substance. Superior intellects recognize moral norms as “mere prejudice,” though useful for maintaining social order. They are certain that “crime is not a crime” and, in a phrase Dostoevsky made famous, that “all is permitted.”
On the other hand, Ivan knows, just knows, that torturing the innocent is absolutely wrong. Objective evil, irreducible to natural or social laws, not only exists but is the most important thing in the world. We must care about the suffering of others. Or as Prince Myshkin maintains, “Compassion is the sole law of human existence.” Absolute amoralism and obsession with evil: Ivan cannot abandon either of these irreconcilable contraries. Science notwithstanding, evil rends his soul.
If Ivan’s materialism leads him to deny God, his moralism prompts him to attack Him for creating a world drenched in the blood of the innocent. Ivan is not so much an atheist as an anti-theist, as he wishes not to deny God but to indict Him. Or as he explains to Alyosha, he can accept God, but “I cannot accept God’s world, and although I know it exists, I don’t accept it at all. It’s not that I don’t accept God, you must understand, it’s the world created by Him that I don’t and cannot accept.”
The next chapter, “Rebellion,” is justly considered one of the greatest passages in world literature. Like the Book of Job, to which this novel often alludes, “Rebellion” mounts an attack on God for allowing evil to triumph and the innocent to suffer. As critics have often remarked, Ivan’s case against God is much stronger than Job’s.
Ivan begins by adopting what he describes as a handicap. Instead of talking about all unjust suffering, he will confine himself “to the suffering of children,” and says, “That reduces the scope of my argument to a tenth of what it would be. Still, we’d better keep to the children, though it does weaken my case.” But of course this focus really strengthens his case. Adults, after all, are all sinners, guilty of numerous moral offenses, and so it is always possible to argue they have deserved their punishments, even apparently unmerited ones. Lying in the surgical ward of a camp hospital, Solzhenitsyn met a Christian doctor who urged him to dwell, not on having been sentenced for crimes he had not committed, but on the moral offenses he had:
I have become convinced that there is no punishment that comes to us in this life on earth which is undeserved. Superficially, it can have nothing to do with what we are guilty of in actual fact, but if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply, you will always be able to hunt down that transgression of yours for which you have now received this blow.
Solzhenitsyn can appreciate the wisdom of these words insofar as they direct us to examine our conscience, but not as a vindication of universal justice. To do so, he ob-serves, “one would have to admit that on that basis those who had been punished even more cruelly than with prison…were some sort of super evil-doers. (And yet…the innocent are those who get punished most zealously of all.)”
By focusing on children too young to be sinful, Ivan circumvents all justifications of God that resemble this doctor’s. Adults have “eaten the apple,” he explains, but “children while they are quite little . . . are so remote from grown-up people; they are different creatures, as it were, of a different species.” But that’s just the problem. For some people, it is precisely this innocence that makes children a tempting target. In their attempt to suppress an uprising of their Slavic subjects, Ivan explains, the Turks “took pleasure in torturing children. . .cutting the unborn child from the mother’s womb, and tossing babies up in the air and catching them on the points of their bayonets before their mother’s eyes. Doing it before the mother’s eyes was what gave zest to the amusement.”
Russian progressives of Dostoevsky’s day routinely argued that crime is always a rational response to unjust social conditions. Since people are rational agents, all one has to do is change social conditions for crime to disappear. Dostoevsky never tired of mocking such naiveté. What had these Turks to gain from tossing those babies on their bayonets except the sheer pleasure that sadistic cruelty can provide—pleasure that has nothing to do with social conditions? By the same token, even when terrorists kill for what they take to be a just cause, there is almost always an element of sadistic pleasure, as Dostoevsky demonstrated in his novel about revolutionaries, The Possessed.
Why kill babies before their mother’s eyes? Why make the killing a spectacle with an audience? One reason is that the cruelty is all the greater: The babies, after all, do not understand what is happening to them and can at most feel brief physical pain, but a mother will never forget the image and sound of her baby’s flesh being impaled. Forced witness multiplies horror. Was something of this sort involved when Hamas fighters filmed their crimes or when Hamas recently created a spectacle by humiliating the hostages they were returning? That is something even the KGB did not do when trading prisoners with the West. Ivan continues:
Here is another scene that I thought very interesting. Imagine a trembling mother with her baby in her arms, a circle of invading Turks around her. They’ve planned a diversion; they pet the baby, laugh to make it laugh. They succeed, the baby laughs. At that point a Turk points a pistol four inches from the baby’s face. The baby laughs with glee, holds out its little hands to the pistol, and he pulls the trigger in the baby’s face and blows out its brains. Artistic, wasn’t it?
I have to ask: Was Shiri Bibas forced to see her children being strangled?
There is another, recognizably Dostoevskian reason for such “artistry”: To witness such a scene is, emotionally speaking, to become a part of it. Exhibitionists know that they can harm their audience by making them aware that they are briefly interested, not in what they see, but in the act of self-degradation. That interest taints them in their own eyes.
Making cruelty “artistic” demonstrates something disturbing about human nature. The Turks, Ivan explains,
burn villages, murder and outrage women and children, they nail their prisoners by the ears to the fences, leave them so till morning, and in the morning they hang them—all sorts of things you can’t imagine. People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that’s all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do so.
We presume our superiority to the beasts, but, morally speaking, we are much worse. How deep does our evil go? For Ivan, “the question is whether it’s due to man’s bad qualities or whether it is inherent in their nature.” That is, is our evil relatively superficial—“bad qualities” that a better society or proper education could eliminate—or does it go all the way down? Is it part of our essence? Like that great reader of Dostoevsky, Freud, Ivan believes it goes all the way down, and Dostoevsky agreed. The difference is that Dostoevsky also believed that the capacity for goodness is no less essential to humanness.
_____________
Lest one imagine that Ivan (or Dostoevsky) means that Turks are uniquely awful, he offers examples from other nationalities. Like Jonathan Swift, Ivan is a master of what I like to call misanthropology—the study of the cussedness of human nature in all its loathsome varieties. Multiculturalists and cultural anthropologists love to celebrate the diversity of human achievements—how charming are their costumes, how quaint their dances, how exquisite their cuisine!—but Ivan dwells on each nation’s preferred form of inflicting pain. Each has its own special “artistry.” Russians, for instance, are no less cruel than Turks, only in a different way: “I have specimens from home that are even better than the Turks. You know we prefer beating—rods and scourges—that’s our national institution. Nailing ears is unthinkable for us, for we are, after all, cultured Europeans. But the rod and the scourge we have always with us.” Western “cultured Europeans” may seem more humane than Russians, “but they make up for it” in other ways “just as national as ours.” How inventive people are in torturing each other!
In “Rebellion,” as in the rest of The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan is fighting a duel with Alyosha for Alyosha’s soul. He wants to shake Alyosha out of his piety, so he offers reasons why apologies for God’s justice must always fail. He works by contrast. First Ivan offers an example of horrendous cruelty, described as only Dostoevsky could. Then he paraphrases, with pointed irony, a common way of denying God’s responsibility for evil, like the ones offered by Job’s friends or in famous philosophical theodicies (justifications of God): “Men are themselves to blame, I suppose; they were given paradise, they wanted freedom, and stole fire from heaven, though they knew they would be unhappy, so there is no need to pity them.”
Combining the biblical story of Adam and Eve with the Greek myth of Prometheus suggests that some such argument, shifting responsibility for human suffering to humanity itself, is probably universal. It is also spurious. Compare the bloody example with the bloodless theodicy, Ivan demands: Would any decent person choose the latter? If not, then not just this but any justification of God that might ever be formulated must prove inadequate.
Ivan has assembled what he calls “a collection of facts,” examples of child abuse drawn from the Russian press and therefore familiar to Dostoevsky’s readers. When I first read this book, I mentally added the case of Sylvia Likens. Ivan mentions a five-year-old girl tortured by her parents, people of “good education and breeding”—not some louts from the countryside. “You see, I must repeat again,” he says, “it is a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing children, and children only. To all other types of humanity these torturers behave mildly and benevolently, like cultured and humane Europeans.” They may even consider themselves benevolent and progressive. The child’s “defenselessness” attracts them because there is a special satisfaction in having another human soul, made in the image of God like one’s own, entirely in one’s power. When Dostoevsky was imprisoned in Siberia, he encountered guards who enjoyed beating prisoners to the point where they would say or do anything for the beating to stop. With the victims’ trembling souls utterly exposed, such guards would shout: “I am your tsar, I am your God!” Making hostages watch and beg for their own freedom while other hostages are being released, as just happened, must provide similar pleasure. So must forcing those being released to salute Hamas propaganda. One person humiliating another person to the depths of his soul: Dostoevsky was the writer who best understood the experience of both. The title of one of his novels, The Insulted and the Humiliated, could serve for them all.
Young children begin with utterly exposed souls and so it can be especially easy, and pleasant, to shock them. As Ivan explains, it is precisely “the angelic countenance of the child who has no refuge and no appeal that sets [the abuser’s] vile blood on fire.” And make no mistake, Ivan continues, these criminals act out impulses dimly pre-
sent in people generally: “In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden—the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain.” The thrill of unchained lawlessness: I wonder whether some of the college students who cheer for Hamas and rip down posters of hostages experience such a thrill? In his novels about the Russian Revolution, Solzhenitsyn suggests that revolutionary leaders rely on this thrill to ensure they can always find followers ready for violence.
Those parents “of good education and breeding” not only beat their child until her body was one bruise, but also, when that diversion had grown stale, “went to greater refinements of cruelty.” They shut her up all night in a cold outhouse and smeared her face with her own excrement. “And it was her mother, her mother did this! Can you understand why a little creature, who can’t even understand what’s done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold and weep her meek unresentful tears to ‘dear, kind God’ to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and brother, you pious and humble novice?”
Challenging Alyosha to justify God, Ivan paraphrases yet another theodicy: Without such cruelty, “I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child’s prayer to ‘dear, kind God’!” Ivan is pleased to see Alyosha visibly suffer and offers to stop. If Alyosha agreed, he would be demonstrating the weakness of piety. “Never mind,” Alyosha replies. “I want to suffer too.”
Ivan’s final example comes from the time of serfdom, when landowners had total control over the peasants they owned: “There was in those days a general of aristocratic connections… one of those men who, retiring from the service into a life of leisure, are convinced that they’ve earned absolute power over the lives of their subjects.” When an eight-year-old boy accidentally injures one of his hunting dogs, the general orders all his servants and the boy’s mother to watch as the boy is stripped naked and ordered to run, whereupon the general’s dogs catch him and “tear him to pieces before the mother’s eyes.” What did that general deserve? Ivan challenges his brother: “To be shot for the satisfaction of our moral feelings?”
“To be shot,” answers Alyosha, “with a pale, twisted smile.”
Ivan is delighted to have shaken Alyosha from his Christian meekness into a demand for violent retribution. When Alyosha immediately retracts his “absurd” statement, Ivan replies that “the world stands on absurdities.” Dostoevsky writes: “’I understand nothing,’ Ivan went on, as though in delirium. ‘I made up my mind long ago not to understand. If I try to understand anything I shall be false to the fact and I have determined to stick to the fact’”—that is, to the raw fact of the child’s suffering. Explanations only obscure the horror of that child beating its little chest and crying out to “dear, kind God,” a phrase Ivan keeps repeating with mounting venom.
Ivan sums up: Imagine the Last Judgment, when God at last reveals the answer to Ivan’s questions. Even if that answer really were adequate, it wouldn’t matter: “From love of humanity … I would rather be left with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong.” If God should say to Ivan, “You have blasphemed against me, but I know you did it from love and compassion, so here is your ticket to heaven,” Ivan would say, “I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible… . It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.”
Alyosha answers that this is “rebellion”—the chapter’s title—and he means rebellion against the universe. Ivan then challenges Alyosha to reply to the most famous question in Russian literature.
Imagine that you could ensure the happiness of mankind if you would consent to “torture to death only one tiny creature—that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance,” would you do it? When Alyosha replies he would not, Ivan demands: If he could not accept the suffering of one such child, how can he accept God’s world in which countless children suffer?
_____________
So powerful is Ivan’s argument that Konstantin Pobedonostsev, chief procurator of the Holy Synod governing the Russian Orthodox Church, wondered how Dostoevsky, whom he knew to be a Christian, could possibly answer it. Pause to consider that the strongest arguments against God ever made are advanced in the world’s greatest Christian novel. But that is the whole point: If one is intellectually honest, as both Ivan and Dostoevsky were, one does not refute one’s opponents’ weakest arguments—any fool can do that—but his strongest ones. And if they have not formulated the strongest arguments on their side, one should do it for them. Dostoevsky was proud that he had made a more powerful case against God than any enemy of religion had. The rest of the novel attempts to answer this case by following Ivan’s own method. It does not advance counterarguments but offers, or aspires to offer, pictures of goodness, love, and meaningfulness more powerful than any argument could be. Whether Dostoevsky succeeded in refuting Ivan is another question.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas went one step beyond those cultured and educated parents who tortured their little girl in secret, under cover of darkness. Hamas filmed and broadcast its crimes as if they were the highest moral feats. Recall the enthusiastic tone of that young man who called his parents to boast about his murders: “Open my WhatsApp now and you’ll see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!… Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her and I killed her husband. I killed ten with my own hands! Dad, ten with my own hands!… Their blood is on my hands,
put Mom on.”
His mother responded: “Oh my son, God bless you!”
“I swear ten with my own hands, Mother… . Dad, go back to WhatsApp now Dad, I want to do a live broadcast… . Mom, your son is a hero, kill, kill, kill!”
“Their blood is on my hands, put Mom on”: In America and elsewhere, Students for Justice in Palestine and other groups rushed to express their delight at the October 7 murders. The more Jewish blood, the better. And when Hamas returned the bodies of the strangled Bibas children, they did so as a great party. Parents brought their children to a baby-murder parade.
Even Hitler and Stalin never did this. They concealed their crimes. I recall reading that the Nazis taunted their Jewish victims that no one would ever find out what had happened to them. With the help of New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, Stalin succeeded in covering up the deliberate starvation of millions of peasants during the
collectivization of agriculture. Photographed with a child hugging him, Stalin conveyed the image of himself as perfectly humane.
La Rochefoucauld famously remarked that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue: Even the vicious profess to believe in kindness. If so, Hamas—and their American followers—are no hypocrites. They flaunt their barbarity. And not just their leaders, but also ordinary people calling home to boast of killings or joyously celebrating the strangling of little children. Such souls are truly dark.
On October 7, and when the Bibas children were returned, I recalled how shaken I had been decades earlier to learn about the torture of Sylvia Likens and to visit what remained of Auschwitz. We often hear of events that partake of evil, but watching Hamas, I felt once again I had touched on evil’s very heart.
Photo: AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg
We want to hear your thoughts about this article. Click here to send a letter to the editor.
