Page 20 - GALIET BENEATH THE ICON: The Lamp Dostoevsky´s Kirillov IV

When Kirillov reasons, “if there is no God, then I am God,”27 we can truly comprehend how his unperplexing contradictions stun Peter for Peter is incapable of comprehending how Kirillov will become God by killing himself. Kirillov, thus, reasons and explains, “If God exists, then everything is His will, and I can do nothing of my own apart from His will. If there’s no God, then everything is my will, and I’m bound to express my self- will... the greatest degree of self-will is to take my own life.”28 Kirillov stakes his heart, once more, by convincing himself and claiming “that man has invented God so as to go on living and not kill himself ... to realize there’s no God, but at the same time not to realize that one’s become God oneself is absurd, or else one would certainly kill oneself.”29 Thus Kirillov says that he will kill himself to prove his “independence and terrifying new freedom” because he is “obliged to believe he doesn’t believe.”30 He is obliged to believe he exists outside of God because his reason overrides his intuitive heart. Nietzsche’s “God is dead” pounds stronger in his head.
In the novel’s culminant, Kirillovian bone-chilling, pre-death frenzy scene of panic, hysteria and despair, Kirillov is shattered between the twilights of reason and spirit, logic and heart. Kirillov bites Peter’s finger in sheer fear and madness. While
27 p. 692
28 p. 691 and p. 692 29 p. 693.
30 p. 694
• 20 •