#alyosha.

‘So there is a man, then, whom I love. Here he is, that man, my dear little brother, whom I love more than anyone in the world, the only one I love in the world. And I loved you so much, that at that moment I thought, ‘I’ll fall on his neck at once.’ Then a stupid idea struck me, to have a joke with you and scare you. I shouted, like a fool, ‘Your money or your life!’ Forgive my foolery, it was only nonsense and there is nothing unseemly in my soul...’ is very prevalent within my mind, as Mitya has a heart only for Alyosha, so much that it is spent on no one else, and detests even himself for wounding him.

Thing I adore about Ivan’s ‘The devil is created by man, created in his own image and likeness,’ is that Alyosha’s immediate response was to say that, ‘So if man were to have made God, he would have made Him in his own image and likeness as well.’

Do you understand...Ivan questioning Alyosha’s religious love for beauty with ‘Love life rather than the meaning of it?’—love and do not turn from it simply because love is not tangible...

‘How he seizes—just like his mother! He is just like his mother he is!’ I cry as I slander my dead wife, of which my convulsing son denies with sorrow.

I must ingrain Ivan’s ‘Man had created the Devil in his own image and likeness,’ and Alyosha’s, ‘Then, too, man has created God, in his own image and likeness!’ It must crawl into my mind, it must be cradled.

Dostoevsky had written his ‘hero’ of The Brothers Karamazov as Alyosha, when there was an educated, rational-thinking man who lived based on scientific, moral principle, and yet he found in Ivan more suffering and blindness to the world, than Alyosha, supposedly the lover of man, as Christ had loved? Whom he will love and love consciously, and cry at the weight of true humanly sorrow, despite its ‘futility’, in modern society—and he had, too, written of the madness the reliance on analysis affected Ivan...for he could not see existence through his own lens...but a lens outside of it...