SOURCE: “Ivan's Devil in The Brothers Karamazov in the Light of a Traditional Platonic View of Evil,” in Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. XXII, No. 1, January, 1986, pp. 1-9.

In the following essay, Corrigan highlights parallels between the devil of Ivan's dream in Feodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Plato's philosophical conception of evil.

In striking contrast to the dramatic power of the Mephistopheles of Goethe or Marlowe and the Satan of Milton or Dante is the devil who appears to Ivan Karamazov. On the threshold of the twentieth century, the devil is depicted as a down-at-heel gentleman, a sponger, a shirker, agreeable enough, but really a bore and a rascal. He would appear, therefore, to be the very antithesis of our conceptions of demonic power. Furthermore, a central dilemma of both the introductory portrayal and the conversation, a dilemma which is never resolved, is the status of...