The Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov

by

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Sometimes referred to as “Vanechka,” Ivan is the second son of Fyodor Karamazov and Sofia Ivanovna, the younger brother of Dmitri, the elder brother of Alexei, and the probable half-brother of Smerdyakov. When the novel begins, the gloomy and withdrawn Ivan is twenty-four years old and is a well-regarded intellectual and atheist. During his schooling years, he demonstrated an “unusual and brilliant aptitude for learning.” Madame Khokhlakov favors Ivan over Dmitri Fyodorovich due to having better manners. Ivan is also in love with Katerina Ivanovna, his brother Dmitri’s fiancée. Like his siblings, Ivan was neglected by his father in childhood, which results in neither man knowing the other. Ivan returns to his father as a practical stranger and becomes ashamed of his father’s drunken conduct. Ivan acts as “a mediator and conciliator” between his father and elder brother. Smerdyakov characterizes Ivan as the most like his father of all of his brothers—a proud sensualist who enjoys living in “peaceful prosperity, without bowing to anyone.” Smerdyakov confesses to Ivan about having killed Fyodor and claims that Ivan wanted his father dead but didn’t want to take the responsibility of murdering him. After Dmitri is arrested for his father’s murder, Ivan plans to raise ten thousand roubles to help with Dmitri’s escape, should he be imprisoned. Ivan eventually succumbs to “brain fever,” or madness, and is taken into Katerina Ivanovna’s home so that she can care for him.

Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov Quotes in The Brothers Karamazov

The The Brothers Karamazov quotes below are all either spoken by Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov or refer to Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Faith vs. Reason Theme Icon
).
Part 2: Book 5, Chapter 3 Quotes

“You see, my dear, there was in the eighteenth century an old sinner who stated that if God did not exist, he would have to be invented […] And man has, indeed, invented God. And the strange thing, the wonder is that such a notion—the notion of the necessity of God—could creep into the head of such a wild and wicked animal as man […] As for me, I long ago decided not to think about whether man created God or God created man […] I have a Euclidean mind, an earthly mind, and therefore it is not for us to resolve things that are not of this world […] All such questions are unsuitable to a mind created with a concept of only three dimensions. And so, I accept God […] It’s not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God’s […] that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept.”

Related Characters: Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov (speaker), Alexei “Alyosha” Fyodorovich Karamazov
Page Number: 234-235
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2: Book 5, Chapter 4 Quotes

“In my opinion, Christ’s love for people is in its kind a miracle impossible on earth. True, he was God. But we are not gods. Let’s say that I, for example, am capable of profound suffering, but another man will never be able to know the degree of my suffering, because he is another and not me, and besides, a man is rarely willing to acknowledge someone else as a sufferer […] And why won’t he acknowledge it, do you think? Because I, for example, have a bad smell, or a foolish face, or once stepped on his foot […] Beggars, especially noble beggars, should never show themselves in the street; they should ask for alms through the newspapers. It’s still possible to love one’s neighbor abstractly, and even occasionally from a distance, but hardly ever up close.”

Related Characters: Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov (speaker), Alexei “Alyosha” Fyodorovich Karamazov
Related Symbols: The Onion
Page Number: 237
Explanation and Analysis:

“You know, with us it’s beating, the birch and the lash, that’s our national way […] I know for certain that there are floggers who get more excited with every stroke, to the point of sensuality, literal sensuality […] I’ve collected a great, great deal about Russian children, Alyosha. A little girl, five years old is hated by her mother and father, ‘most honorable and official people, educated, and well-bred.’ You see, once again I positively maintain that this peculiar quality exists in much of mankind—this love of torturing children, but only children [….] These educated parents subjected the poor five-year-old girl to every possible torture. They beat her, flogged her, kicked her, not knowing why themselves, until her whole body was nothing but bruises […] they locked her all night in the outhouse, because she wouldn’t ask to get up and go in the middle of the night […] for that they smeared her face with her excrement and made her eat the excrement […]”

Related Characters: Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov (speaker), Alexei “Alyosha” Fyodorovich Karamazov
Page Number: 239, 241-242
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2: Book 5, Chapter 5 Quotes

“My action is set in Spain, in Seville, in the most horrible time of the Inquisition, when fires blazed every day to the glory of God, and ‘In the splendid auto-da-fé / Evil heretics were burnt.’ Oh, of course, this was not that coming in which he will appear, according to his promise, at the end of time, in all his heavenly glory, and which will be sudden ‘as the lightening that shineth out of the east unto the west.’ No, he desired to visit his children if only for a moment, and precisely where the fires of the heretics had begun to crackle. In his infinite mercy, he walked once again among men, in the same human image in which he had walked for three years among men fifteen centuries earlier.”

Related Characters: Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov (speaker), Alexei “Alyosha” Fyodorovich Karamazov, The Cardinal Grand Inquisitor
Page Number: 248
Explanation and Analysis:

“In the deep darkness, the iron door of the prison suddenly opens, and the Grand Inquisitor himself slowly enters carrying a lamp. He is alone, the door is immediately locked behind him. He stands in the entrance and for a long time, for a minute or two, gazes into his face. At last he quietly approaches […] ‘Is it you? You?’ […] ‘Why, then, have you come to interfere with us? […] I do not know who you are, and I do not want to know whether it is you, or only his likeness; but tomorrow I shall condemn you and burn you at the stake as the most evil of heretics, and the very people who today kissed your feet, tomorrow, at a nod from me, will rush to heap the coals up around your stake […]’”

Related Characters: Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov (speaker), Alexei “Alyosha” Fyodorovich Karamazov, The Cardinal Grand Inquisitor
Page Number: 250
Explanation and Analysis:

“Freedom, free reason, and science will lead them into such a maze, and confront them with such miracles and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, unruly and ferocious, will exterminate themselves; others, unruly but feeble, will exterminate each other; and the remaining third, feeble and wretched, will crawl to our feet and cry out to us: ‘Yes, you were right, you alone possess his mystery, and we are coming back to you—save us from ourselves’ [….] But the flock will gather again, and again submit, and this time once and for all.”

Related Characters: Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov (speaker), Alexei “Alyosha” Fyodorovich Karamazov, The Cardinal Grand Inquisitor
Page Number: 258
Explanation and Analysis:

Oh, we will allow them to sin, too; they are weak and powerless, and they will love us like children for allowing them to sin. We will tell them that every sin will be redeemed if it is committed with our permission; and that we allow them to sin because we love them, and as for the punishment for these sins, very well, we take it upon ourselves [….] And they will have no secrets from us. We will allow them or forbid them to live with their wives and mistresses, to have or not to have children—all depending on their obedience—and they will submit to us gladly and joyfully. The most tormenting secrets of their conscience—all, they will bring to us, and we will decide all things, and they will joyfully believe our decision […] Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in your name, and beyond the grave they will find only death.”

Related Characters: Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov (speaker), Alexei “Alyosha” Fyodorovich Karamazov, The Cardinal Grand Inquisitor
Page Number: 259
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Book 11, Chapter 8 Quotes

“He ran there, went up to the window […] ‘Grushenka,’ he called, ‘Grushenka, are you here?’ He called her, but he didn’t want to lean out the window, he didn’t want to move away from me […] because he was very afraid of me [….] ‘But there she is,’ I said (I went up to the window and leaned all the way out), ‘there she is in the bushes, smiling to you, see?’ He suddenly believed it, he just started shaking, because he really was very much in love with her, sir, and he leaned all the way out the window. Then I grabbed that same cast-iron paperweight, the one on his desk […] and I swung and hit him from behind on the top of the head with the corner of it.”

Related Characters: Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov (speaker), Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov
Related Symbols: The Envelope and the Three Thousand Roubles
Page Number: 629
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Book 11, Chapter 9 Quotes

“I am perhaps the only man in all of nature who loves the truth and sincerely desires good. I was there when the Word died on the cross and was ascending into heaven, carrying on his bosom the soul of the thief who was crucified to the right of him, I heard the joyful shrieks of the cherubim singing and shouting ‘Hosannah,’ and the thundering shout of rapture from the seraphim, which made heaven and all creation shake. And, I swear by all that’s holy, I wanted to join the chorus and shout ‘Hosannah’ with everyone else. It was right on my lips, it was already bursting from my breast…you know, I’m very sensitive and artistically susceptible. But common sense—oh, it’s the most unfortunate quality of my nature—kept me within due bounds even then, and I missed the moment!”

Related Characters: The Gentleman (speaker), Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov
Page Number: 647
Explanation and Analysis:

“Someone takes all the honor of the good for himself and only leaves me the nasty tricks. But I don’t covet the honor of living as a moocher, I’m not ambitious. Why, of all beings in the world, am I alone condemned to be cursed by all decent people, and even to be kicked with boots [….] There’s a secret here, I know, but they won’t reveal this secret to me for anything, because then, having learned what it’s all about, I might just roar ‘Hosannah,’ and the necessary minus would immediately disappear and sensibleness would set in all over the world [….] No, until the secret is revealed, two truths exist for me: one is theirs, from there, and so far completely unknown to me; the other is mine. And who knows which is preferable…”

Related Characters: The Gentleman (speaker), Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov
Page Number: 647-648
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Book 12, Chapter 5 Quotes

“‘The thing is that I am precisely in my right mind...my vile mind, the same as you, and all these m-mugs!’ he suddenly turned to the public. ‘A murdered father, and they pretend to be frightened,’ he growled with fierce contempt. ‘They pull faces to each other. Liars! Everyone wants his father dead. Viper devours viper…If there were no parricide, they’d all get angry and go home in a foul temper…Circuses! ‘Bread and circuses!’ […] Calm yourselves, I’m not mad, I’m simply a murderer! […] I have no witnesses. That dog Smerdyakov won’t send you evidence from the other world…in an envelope. You keep asking for envelopes, as if one wasn’t enough. I have no witnesses…except one, perhaps [….] He’s got a tail, Your Honor, you’d find him inadmissible! Le diable n’existe point!

Related Characters: Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov (speaker), Alexei “Alyosha” Fyodorovich Karamazov, Lieutenant Dmitri “Mitya” Fyodorovich Karamazov, Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov, Katerina “Katya” Ivanovna Verkhovtsev, Fetyukovich, The Presiding Judge
Related Symbols: The Envelope and the Three Thousand Roubles
Page Number: 686-687
Explanation and Analysis:
Epilogue, Chapter 2 Quotes

“Love is gone, Mitya!” Katya began again, “but what is gone is painfully dear to me. Know that, for all eternity. But now, for one minute, let it be as it might have been,” she prattled with a twisted smile, again looking joyfully into his eyes. “You now love another, I love another, but still I shall love you eternally, and you me, did you know that? Love me, do you hear, love me all your life!” she exclaimed with some sort of almost threatening tremor in her voice.

Related Characters: Katerina “Katya” Ivanovna Verkhovtsev (speaker), Lieutenant Dmitri “Mitya” Fyodorovich Karamazov, Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov, Agrafena “Grushenka” Alexandrovna Svetlov
Page Number: 766
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire The Brothers Karamazov LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Brothers Karamazov PDF

Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov Quotes in The Brothers Karamazov

The The Brothers Karamazov quotes below are all either spoken by Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov or refer to Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Faith vs. Reason Theme Icon
).
Part 2: Book 5, Chapter 3 Quotes

“You see, my dear, there was in the eighteenth century an old sinner who stated that if God did not exist, he would have to be invented […] And man has, indeed, invented God. And the strange thing, the wonder is that such a notion—the notion of the necessity of God—could creep into the head of such a wild and wicked animal as man […] As for me, I long ago decided not to think about whether man created God or God created man […] I have a Euclidean mind, an earthly mind, and therefore it is not for us to resolve things that are not of this world […] All such questions are unsuitable to a mind created with a concept of only three dimensions. And so, I accept God […] It’s not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God’s […] that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept.”

Related Characters: Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov (speaker), Alexei “Alyosha” Fyodorovich Karamazov
Page Number: 234-235
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2: Book 5, Chapter 4 Quotes

“In my opinion, Christ’s love for people is in its kind a miracle impossible on earth. True, he was God. But we are not gods. Let’s say that I, for example, am capable of profound suffering, but another man will never be able to know the degree of my suffering, because he is another and not me, and besides, a man is rarely willing to acknowledge someone else as a sufferer […] And why won’t he acknowledge it, do you think? Because I, for example, have a bad smell, or a foolish face, or once stepped on his foot […] Beggars, especially noble beggars, should never show themselves in the street; they should ask for alms through the newspapers. It’s still possible to love one’s neighbor abstractly, and even occasionally from a distance, but hardly ever up close.”

Related Characters: Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov (speaker), Alexei “Alyosha” Fyodorovich Karamazov
Related Symbols: The Onion
Page Number: 237
Explanation and Analysis:

“You know, with us it’s beating, the birch and the lash, that’s our national way […] I know for certain that there are floggers who get more excited with every stroke, to the point of sensuality, literal sensuality […] I’ve collected a great, great deal about Russian children, Alyosha. A little girl, five years old is hated by her mother and father, ‘most honorable and official people, educated, and well-bred.’ You see, once again I positively maintain that this peculiar quality exists in much of mankind—this love of torturing children, but only children [….] These educated parents subjected the poor five-year-old girl to every possible torture. They beat her, flogged her, kicked her, not knowing why themselves, until her whole body was nothing but bruises […] they locked her all night in the outhouse, because she wouldn’t ask to get up and go in the middle of the night […] for that they smeared her face with her excrement and made her eat the excrement […]”

Related Characters: Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov (speaker), Alexei “Alyosha” Fyodorovich Karamazov
Page Number: 239, 241-242
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2: Book 5, Chapter 5 Quotes

“My action is set in Spain, in Seville, in the most horrible time of the Inquisition, when fires blazed every day to the glory of God, and ‘In the splendid auto-da-fé / Evil heretics were burnt.’ Oh, of course, this was not that coming in which he will appear, according to his promise, at the end of time, in all his heavenly glory, and which will be sudden ‘as the lightening that shineth out of the east unto the west.’ No, he desired to visit his children if only for a moment, and precisely where the fires of the heretics had begun to crackle. In his infinite mercy, he walked once again among men, in the same human image in which he had walked for three years among men fifteen centuries earlier.”

Related Characters: Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov (speaker), Alexei “Alyosha” Fyodorovich Karamazov, The Cardinal Grand Inquisitor
Page Number: 248
Explanation and Analysis:

“In the deep darkness, the iron door of the prison suddenly opens, and the Grand Inquisitor himself slowly enters carrying a lamp. He is alone, the door is immediately locked behind him. He stands in the entrance and for a long time, for a minute or two, gazes into his face. At last he quietly approaches […] ‘Is it you? You?’ […] ‘Why, then, have you come to interfere with us? […] I do not know who you are, and I do not want to know whether it is you, or only his likeness; but tomorrow I shall condemn you and burn you at the stake as the most evil of heretics, and the very people who today kissed your feet, tomorrow, at a nod from me, will rush to heap the coals up around your stake […]’”

Related Characters: Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov (speaker), Alexei “Alyosha” Fyodorovich Karamazov, The Cardinal Grand Inquisitor
Page Number: 250
Explanation and Analysis:

“Freedom, free reason, and science will lead them into such a maze, and confront them with such miracles and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, unruly and ferocious, will exterminate themselves; others, unruly but feeble, will exterminate each other; and the remaining third, feeble and wretched, will crawl to our feet and cry out to us: ‘Yes, you were right, you alone possess his mystery, and we are coming back to you—save us from ourselves’ [….] But the flock will gather again, and again submit, and this time once and for all.”

Related Characters: Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov (speaker), Alexei “Alyosha” Fyodorovich Karamazov, The Cardinal Grand Inquisitor
Page Number: 258
Explanation and Analysis:

Oh, we will allow them to sin, too; they are weak and powerless, and they will love us like children for allowing them to sin. We will tell them that every sin will be redeemed if it is committed with our permission; and that we allow them to sin because we love them, and as for the punishment for these sins, very well, we take it upon ourselves [….] And they will have no secrets from us. We will allow them or forbid them to live with their wives and mistresses, to have or not to have children—all depending on their obedience—and they will submit to us gladly and joyfully. The most tormenting secrets of their conscience—all, they will bring to us, and we will decide all things, and they will joyfully believe our decision […] Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in your name, and beyond the grave they will find only death.”

Related Characters: Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov (speaker), Alexei “Alyosha” Fyodorovich Karamazov, The Cardinal Grand Inquisitor
Page Number: 259
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Book 11, Chapter 8 Quotes

“He ran there, went up to the window […] ‘Grushenka,’ he called, ‘Grushenka, are you here?’ He called her, but he didn’t want to lean out the window, he didn’t want to move away from me […] because he was very afraid of me [….] ‘But there she is,’ I said (I went up to the window and leaned all the way out), ‘there she is in the bushes, smiling to you, see?’ He suddenly believed it, he just started shaking, because he really was very much in love with her, sir, and he leaned all the way out the window. Then I grabbed that same cast-iron paperweight, the one on his desk […] and I swung and hit him from behind on the top of the head with the corner of it.”

Related Characters: Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov (speaker), Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov
Related Symbols: The Envelope and the Three Thousand Roubles
Page Number: 629
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Book 11, Chapter 9 Quotes

“I am perhaps the only man in all of nature who loves the truth and sincerely desires good. I was there when the Word died on the cross and was ascending into heaven, carrying on his bosom the soul of the thief who was crucified to the right of him, I heard the joyful shrieks of the cherubim singing and shouting ‘Hosannah,’ and the thundering shout of rapture from the seraphim, which made heaven and all creation shake. And, I swear by all that’s holy, I wanted to join the chorus and shout ‘Hosannah’ with everyone else. It was right on my lips, it was already bursting from my breast…you know, I’m very sensitive and artistically susceptible. But common sense—oh, it’s the most unfortunate quality of my nature—kept me within due bounds even then, and I missed the moment!”

Related Characters: The Gentleman (speaker), Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov
Page Number: 647
Explanation and Analysis:

“Someone takes all the honor of the good for himself and only leaves me the nasty tricks. But I don’t covet the honor of living as a moocher, I’m not ambitious. Why, of all beings in the world, am I alone condemned to be cursed by all decent people, and even to be kicked with boots [….] There’s a secret here, I know, but they won’t reveal this secret to me for anything, because then, having learned what it’s all about, I might just roar ‘Hosannah,’ and the necessary minus would immediately disappear and sensibleness would set in all over the world [….] No, until the secret is revealed, two truths exist for me: one is theirs, from there, and so far completely unknown to me; the other is mine. And who knows which is preferable…”

Related Characters: The Gentleman (speaker), Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov
Page Number: 647-648
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Book 12, Chapter 5 Quotes

“‘The thing is that I am precisely in my right mind...my vile mind, the same as you, and all these m-mugs!’ he suddenly turned to the public. ‘A murdered father, and they pretend to be frightened,’ he growled with fierce contempt. ‘They pull faces to each other. Liars! Everyone wants his father dead. Viper devours viper…If there were no parricide, they’d all get angry and go home in a foul temper…Circuses! ‘Bread and circuses!’ […] Calm yourselves, I’m not mad, I’m simply a murderer! […] I have no witnesses. That dog Smerdyakov won’t send you evidence from the other world…in an envelope. You keep asking for envelopes, as if one wasn’t enough. I have no witnesses…except one, perhaps [….] He’s got a tail, Your Honor, you’d find him inadmissible! Le diable n’existe point!

Related Characters: Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov (speaker), Alexei “Alyosha” Fyodorovich Karamazov, Lieutenant Dmitri “Mitya” Fyodorovich Karamazov, Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov, Katerina “Katya” Ivanovna Verkhovtsev, Fetyukovich, The Presiding Judge
Related Symbols: The Envelope and the Three Thousand Roubles
Page Number: 686-687
Explanation and Analysis:
Epilogue, Chapter 2 Quotes

“Love is gone, Mitya!” Katya began again, “but what is gone is painfully dear to me. Know that, for all eternity. But now, for one minute, let it be as it might have been,” she prattled with a twisted smile, again looking joyfully into his eyes. “You now love another, I love another, but still I shall love you eternally, and you me, did you know that? Love me, do you hear, love me all your life!” she exclaimed with some sort of almost threatening tremor in her voice.

Related Characters: Katerina “Katya” Ivanovna Verkhovtsev (speaker), Lieutenant Dmitri “Mitya” Fyodorovich Karamazov, Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov, Agrafena “Grushenka” Alexandrovna Svetlov
Page Number: 766
Explanation and Analysis: