Page 15 - GALIET BENEATH THE ICON: The Lamp Dostoevsky´s Kirillov IV

recollection of seeing a perfect leaf in childhood. His vision can be easily and clearly interpreted as a state reminiscent to Buddhism’s nirvana:
“Not long ago I saw (a leaf) that was yellow, slightly green, wilted around the edges. It was blowing in the wind. When I was ten years old I used to close my eyes on purpose and imagine a leaf 3⁄4 green, with bright veins on it, the sun shining. I would open my eyes and be unable to believe it because it was all so good, so I’d shut my eyes again...a leaf is good. Everything is good.”14
Kirillov sees perfection. Although Kirillov’s spirit beautifies this sublime moment with the sun’s perfection 3⁄4 goodness fused with divinity as felt through the simplicity of light resting upon a leaf as if it were ecstasy 3⁄4 Kirillov’s rapture of the ‘other’ doesn’t make sense to Stavrogin: he invites argument. Stavrogin asks the all-too-Socratic question: does Kirillov’s ‘piety’ and ‘everything’ include “violating a little girl?”15 Kirillov replies by insisting that “it does” although he slithers away from the argument into an absolute statement: “everything is good.” For Kirillov, it means that goodness is good “...for all those who know it’s good. If they knew it was good, it’d be good; but as long as they don’t know it’s good; it isn’t good.” Such statement burns with Plato’s theory of forms where the highest
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