Dostoevsky vs. the Marquis de Sade

Yet Ivan is not wholly Sadean; his inability to grasp love springs from revulsion at cruelty and sadism, and at the sufferings of the innocent, and he rejects the Sadean utilitarian rationalization of cruelty to the innocent to achieve a greater good.

Just as Svidrigaylov complements Raskolnikov, the divinity student Rakitin--self-serving, avaricious, cynical--complements Ivan. Rakitin declares that one loves only for selfish reasons and that "fools are made for wise men's profit." He wants to write an article proving that Dmitri "couldn't help" murdering Fyodor because his environment corrupted him. Visiting the imprisoned Dmitri, he expounds a Sadean materialism and determinism to debunk Christianity, telling Dmitri that one sees and thinks because of nerve fibers in the brain, "not because I have a soul, and am some sort of image and likeness." What will become of men, Dmitri asks, without God and immortality? "All things are lawful then, they can do what they like?" Rakitin's response encapsulates Sade: "A clever man can do what he likes." (30)

The turbulent libertines Fyodor and Dmitri Karamazov portray Sadean sexuality. Drunken, lecherous, unabashedly aware of his own evil, Fyodor finds a young girl's beauty and innocence attractive, but only as an invitation to cruelty. He makes her his second wife and subjects her to cruelty and degradation. Her deep piety provokes only malicious desecration of her ikon of Our Lady: "You believe it's miraculous, but here, I'll spit on it and nothing will happen to me!" Fyodor refers to young men who flog girls sentenced to be whipped, and the girls themselves, as "a set of de Sades." Having offended the holy elder Father Zossima, Fyodor tells Alyosha that if there's a God he will have to answer for it, but if there is not, the fathers are not entitled to anything. Like Sade, he wants Christianity suppressed "that Truth may prevail." (31)

Dmitri admits his love of vice, "the dishonour of vice," and cruelty to Alyosha. "Sensual lust is a tempest," he declares. He abandons his fiancee Katerina out of sexual obsession with Grushenka, after whom his father also lusts. He engages in drunken frolics, attacks his father, and assaults and batters Fyodor's old servant Gregory on the night of Fyodor's murder.

For all his passions and follies, Dmitri is alert to rationalizations for what he wants to do. He fastens immediately on Ivan's formulation that if there is no God, anything goes. He is receptive to Rakitin's Sadean materialism, and voices Sade's moral relativism: "Goodness is one thing with me and another with a Chinaman, so it's relative." (32)

Smerdyakov represents the murderous criminality in Sadean egoism. From boyhood on he is silent, sullen, and withdrawn. When Gregory attempted to teach him Scripture when he was twelve, Smerdyakov mocked the Creation narrative. Not only an atheist but also a sadist, Smerdyakov enjoyed hanging cats as a child and, before Fyodor Karamazov's murder, tells the boy Ilusha to put a pin in a piece of bread and throw it to a hungry dog, who eats it and runs away squealing in pain. During Ivan's visit after the murder, Smerdyakov says to Ivan, "You [original italics] murdered him. You are the murderer! I was only your instrument, your faithful servant, and it was following your words I did it." His motive was to steal money to begin a new life, but the idea took root "chiefly because 'all things are lawful,'" which Ivan had apparently expounded to him frequently. Ivan was right, he tells him, to preach that if there is no God, virtue neither exists nor is necessary. "So that's how I looked at it." (33)