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From Skandalon to Scandal: Ivan's Rebellion Reconsidered

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Harriet Murav
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Abstract

Ivan Karamazov articulates the philosophical problem of the limits of religion in his “Rebellion.” In this article, Harriet Murav argues that, far from being an enemy of religion, Ivan gets to the heart of the problem of responding to the suffering of the other. Christ crucified is a scandalous temptation, according to St. Paul. Extending the logic of the skandalon to Ivan makes possible an alternative reading of his “Rebellion.” The suffering of the innocent child is Ivan's “stumbling block,”—the skandalon that prevents him from accepting the meaningfulness of human history. But reading Ivan's position as nothing more than an attack on religion gets us off the hook of the skandalon too easily. To remain hypnotized by the difficulty without taking responsibility would be equally disastrous. Ivan's “Rebellion” makes legible the simultaneous impossibility and possibility of faith. Vasilii Rozanov, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida provide the framework in which to read the “Rebellion.”

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 63 , Issue 4 , Winter 2004 , pp. 756 - 770
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2004

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References

I could not have written this paper without Bruce Rosenstock's assistance.

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42. Ibid., 14:222.

43. Derrida, Acts of Religion, 86.

44. Ibid., 87.

45. Dostoevskii, Polnoesobraniesochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 14:216.

46. Vladimir Kantor similarly writes that, in Ivan, “Dostoevsky is writing his own variant of a man tormented by the divine structure of the world, and that man's path to selfknowledge and to knowledge of the meaning of the world.” Kantor, Vladimir, “Pavel Smerdyakov and Ivan Karamazov: The Problem of Temptation,” in Pattison, George and Thompson, Diane Oenning, eds., Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition (Cambridge, Eng., 2001), 196–97Google Scholar.

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