Reading The Brothers Karamazov: Everything Is Permitted

[Read all my Dostoevsky stuff.]

There is a phrase in The Brothers Karamazov that has been traveling through the culture, usually without a clear address. It is attributed to Ivan Karamazov but he never actually says it, though he admits it is agreeable to him. It is rendered through the various translations as “everything is permitted” or “all things are lawful.” Though these phrases come from the same word in Russian, the difference in English is rather stark.

Constance Garnett set the terms. Her translation, completed in 1912 and for decades the standard English version, still useful today, renders the phrase as "all things are lawful." That wording established a tradition. David McDuff, translating for Penguin in the 1990s, stays with it — "all things are lawful" throughout. McDuff is a thoroughly modern translator with deliberate instincts. His choice is based on his deliberate reading of the novel as a whole...and the fact that it is, apparently, attempting to match Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.

The break comes with Andrew MacAndrew in 1970. He goes with "everything is permitted," and the modern consensus follows him. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1990) use "everything is permitted" throughout their widely-read Bicentennial Edition. Michael Katz, in his Liveright translation (2024), also defaults to "everything is permitted" — with one notable exception I will return to.

The Russian word is razresheno — the neuter short-form passive participle of razreshit', meaning to permit, to allow, to authorize, to lift a prohibition. Literally: it has been allowed. It appears on public Russian signs. 'Razresheno kurit'. Smoking permitted. It does not intrinsically invoke moral codes or divine judgment. The barrier has simply been removed. Dostoevsky had other choices if he wanted to sound heavier — zakonno for lawful, pravomerno for legitimate, spravedlivo for just. He didn't use those. He used razresheno.

Katz, in a moment between Ivan and Alyosha, does something no other translator attempts. He renders Alyosha's question as: "Meaning that 'everything is permitted'? All things are lawful — and is that it?" He puts both phrasings in the same breath, as if acknowledging that razresheno genuinely holds both meanings and that English must choose. It is actually a very logical, inclusive, empathetic way for Alyosha to approach Ivan at this point. That is the most honest acknowledgment of the translation problem in any of the major versions.

What Garnett and McDuff mean by "lawful" is not legal or ethical in the civil sense. It is theological. Lawful before God, who observes and judges every immortal soul. Without immortality, without divine judgment, there is no one keeping the moral books. The law of God lapses. This is consistent with the novel's world, where the question is not whether human courts will punish you but whether the universe itself holds you accountable. In that sense, "lawful" is shorthand for: permitted in the eyes of the only judge who ultimately matters.

That Biblical resonance almost certainly comes from I Corinthians — Paul's "all things are lawful for me," a phrase that would have been as familiar to Dostoevsky's Russian readers as to Garnett's English ones. But the Pauline connection, however theologically elegant, does not survive scrutiny at the level of the Russian text.

McDuff's footnote links razresheno to Paul's phrase in 1 Corinthians 6:12 as if Dostoevsky were consciously echoing it. The Russian Synodal Bible, the text Dostoevsky's readers would have known, renders Paul's phrase as vse mne pozvolitelno — an entirely different word, pozvolitelno, from pozvolit', meaning to allow or permit. It seems the same in English but in Russian this is not razresheno.

Dostoevsky had Paul's exact word available to him and did not use it. If he had wanted his readers to hear that Pauline voice he could have written pozvolitelno and the echo would have been unmistakable. He wrote razresheno instead, the blunter, more administrative word, the one that appears on signs. The Pauline connection is McDuff's editorial argument, imported through a footnote. It is not in the Russian text, however. Which is why MacAndrew changed it over 55 years ago.

The first full statement of the argument comes through Miusov, who reports Ivan's position at a gathering before the novel's central action begins. In P&V:

"...if there is and has been any love on earth up to now, it has come not from natural law but solely from people's belief in their immortality... Not only that, but then nothing would be immoral any longer, everything would be permitted, even anthropophagy." (pp. 123–124)

This is already second-hand. Miusov is reporting, not quoting. The argument has been filtered before we hear it. Then the Elder asks Ivan directly, and Ivan answers in his own voice, stripped of all elaboration. McDuff renders it:

"Without immortality there can be no virtue." (page 95)

That sentence is the bedrock. Everything else — the formula, the syllogism, the paraphrasing, Smerdyakov's ultimately weaponized version — rests on it. And Dostoevsky never has anyone examine it. In fact, the novel is never that blunt again. It is stated and accepted as the premise of the central philosophical problem without a single character asking whether it is actually true. Is human love really just a by-product of our need for an immortal soul? Do we really “behave” for no reason other than to escape from going to hell?

Rakitin immediately condenses it into its three-step form. All three translators handle this slightly differently, and the differences are worth noting. In Katz:

"There's no immortality of the soul, so there's no virtue, and that means everything is permitted." (page 98)

In McDuff, Rakitin calls it "a seductive theory for scoundrels." In P&V it is "a tempting theory for scoundrels." Rakitin knows the formula is not a direct quote — but he twists it, reaching for liberty, equality, and fraternity as secular grounds for virtue. But then he stops himself, remembering something else, and the counter-argument is never made. Dostoevsky gives us the objection and then withdraws it. That withdrawal is one of the novel's deepest evasions.

Ivan accepts ownership of the formula when Alyosha presses him, but notice how he does it. In P&V:

"Yes, perhaps 'everything is permitted,' since the word has already been spoken. I do not renounce it." (page 421)

He accepts a simplification he never fully argued. And P&V render Alyosha's question with exactly the right rhythm:

"You mean 'everything is permitted'? Everything is permitted, is that right, is it?" (page 422)

The repetition is the point. The phrase lands once as a question and again as a kind of horrified confirmation. Nothing has been justified. The brakes have simply come off. That doubling is one of the passages that makes "permitted" the superior translation — the word tolerates the general blankness that "lawful" fills with specific theological gravity.

Katz renders the same moment differently — and in doing so produces the only instance in any major English translation where both phrases appear together:

"Meaning that 'everything is permitted'? All things are lawful — and is that it?" (page 312)

Alyosha reaches for "permitted" first, then deepens it with "lawful" — cycling through both valences of razresheno in real time, as if trying to land on the right word for what his brother has just confessed to. No other translator does this. Every other version commits to one word and holds it. Katz alone lets the seam show — and inadvertently stages the entire translation debate inside a single line of dialogue. Then again, it is the only sentence in the novel where the phrase appears back to back as a question and an exclamation. Katz did the right thing.

The only problem here is we have to go all the way back to what Ivan actually says of his own accord. If there is no immortality then there is no virtue. In this specific regard, Ivan and Miusov (following him) are wrong. This is a bad intellectual formula. The premise has no basis in anything at all.

It does not follow from the godless mortality of human beings that murder is suddenly permissible. The absence of an immortal soul does not cancel virtue, human law, the harm principle, or the moral weight of causing suffering to another person. The suggestion that virtue is this nebulous thing that varies among people does not change the fact there is virtue everywhere everyday all over the world. It’s diversity doesn’t cancel its existence. Ivan’s own life confirms this by helping his older brother, whom he despises, and by saving the life of a random drunkard in the middle of a blizzard.

Confucian ethics required no immortal soul. Stoic ethics grounded virtue in reason and nature, indifferent to the fate of the self after death. Buddhist ethics, which explicitly denies a permanent self, produced one of the most sophisticated moral traditions humanity has developed. Aristotle grounds virtue in flourishing, here, in this life. None of these systems depend on a transcendent reward structure. All of them recognize that murder is wrong — not because of what happens to your soul, but because of what it does to another human being and to the fabric that makes communal life possible.

Dostoevsky writes as if none of this exists. Ivan never engages with any of it. The novel never challenges him on the premise. It is simply asserted, dramatized for eight hundred pages, and left standing. Dostoevsky proclaims without evaluation that if it weren’t for our immortal souls there would be no human virtue.

But there is a second problem that cuts deeper still. If the only reason not to harm another person is the fate of your own immortal soul — if virtue is ultimately grounded in celestial self-interest — then what you have is not virtue at all. A person who refrains from cruelty solely because they fear eternal punishment is not a moral person. They are a prudent one with a very long time horizon. Genuine virtue must be indifferent to what happens to the agent. You refrain from murder not because of what it costs your soul, but because of what it does to someone else. This requires no immortality at all.

Which brings us to the strangest thing about the novel's philosophical landscape. Virtue is invoked only to be declared impossible. Nobody discusses it as a lived reality. Nobody in the novel's 900 pages asks what virtue actually is — except Mitya, in prison, and he cannot answer his own question. In Katz:

"Because what is virtue? Answer me, Alyosha. I have one kind of virtue and a Chinaman has another — in other words, it's all relative. Or not? Or else it's not relative? That's a tricky question. You won't start laughing at me if I tell you that it's been keeping me awake for the last two nights." (Katz, pp. 688–689)

Alyosha doesn't answer. That exchange is the closest the novel comes to an open inquiry into what virtue is, and it arrives through the most morally compromised of the brothers, unanswered, in a prison cell. Dostoevsky stages the question and then abandons it.

Alyosha himself doesn't talk about virtue. He talks about love, presence, and forgiveness. Zosima doesn't talk much about virtue. He talks about active love and responsibility for all. Rakitin's counter-claim reaches for political categories — liberty, equality, fraternity — and then stops. Nobody comes back at Ivan and says: here is what virtue actually is, here is where it comes from without God, here is why your premise is false. “everything is permitted” and “all things are lawful” are used to announce the end of something that was never examined in the first place. This is a weakness in Dostoevsky’s truth.

The novel is full of people behaving with something recognizable as virtue — without any reference to the immortality of their souls. Alyosha's goodness has nothing to do with the fate of his soul after death. Grushenka's spontaneous act of kindness — the onion metaphor — isn't a calculation about eternity. Even Mitya's tormented sense of honor, his inability to take all the money from Katerina's envelope despite every temptation, isn't grounded in fear of damnation. It is grounded in something he cannot articulate but cannot abandon. Finite human virtue.

Dostoevsky dramatizes the refutation of Ivan's premise on every page while never stating it as an argument. The novel's action contradicts its most famous philosophical claim. And no one in the novel says so out loud. That silence is the novel's deepest problem — and its most interesting one.

Read in sequence, the passages across all three translations make visible something the novel's pacing conceals: the formula doesn't stay with Ivan. It migrates. Miusov distorts it in his report. Rakitin condenses it contemptuously. Mitya proclaims "I shall remember" and carries it to prison. Ivan accepts a version of it he never exactly built. And then Smerdyakov weaponizes it back against Ivan with the most devastating precision of anyone in the novel. In McDuff’s translation he says to Ivan:

"It was true what you taught me, sir, for you told me a lot about that then: for if there is no infinite God, then there is no virtue, either, and there is no need of it whatever. That was true, what you said. And that was how I thought, too." (McDuff, page 807)

Earlier in the same exchange, Smerdyakov turns the formula back on the man who originated it and is slowly breaking down:

"You were ever the bold one, sir, 'all things are lawful', you used to say, and now look how a-feared you are!" (McDuff, p. 798)

In McDuff, "all things are lawful" as a taunt carries its full theological weight — the man who declared God's judgment dissolved is now trembling before a human court. P&V's version strikes the same note with different music: "You used to be brave once, sir, you used to say 'Everything is permitted,' sir, and now you've got so frightened!" Both translations state the irony cleanly. Ivan's courage was theoretical. The practical consequences came for someone else.

In the end, Smerdyakov does something that the formula cannot accommodate: he returns the money. Without coming to believe in God. Without any reversion to the system Ivan's formula supposedly dismantled. In P&V:

"Why are you giving it back then?" "Enough... it's no use, sir!" (page 991)

Within the logic of "everything is permitted" there is no reason to return the money. He does it anyway. The formula he operationalized is refused by its own practitioner, and the refusal is inexplicable within the formula's terms. Dostoevsky doesn't explain it. He just lets it stand as a powerful response to Ivan's claim.

These two phrases are not competing renderings of the same idea. They come from the same word in Russian. But in English they make claims of entirely different kinds — and only one of them is true.

"All things are lawful" is always false. It was false before Dostoevsky wrote the novel, and it would be false in any world Dostoevsky could imagine. Every legal and moral system in human history has prohibited a core set of acts: murder, rape, arson, extortion, malicious injury to another person and so on and so forth. No society has ever existed in which everything was lawful. The claim defeats itself the moment you say it. Remove God from the picture entirely and human law remains. Courts sit. Murder is still illegal. The prohibited acts are still prohibited. There is no conceivable condition — theological or secular — under which everything is lawful.

"Everything is permitted" is a different and more precise claim in English — and it is, in a real sense, how permission has always worked. Law operates by prohibition: it names what is forbidden, and everything outside those prohibitions is permitted by default. Permitted is the larger category. It contains everything that is explicitly lawful and everything the law is simply silent about. "Everything is permitted" does not mean murder is now acceptable. Ivan certainly does not mean to imply that when he adopts the phrase, which, in fact, he did not originally utter. Everything is permitted except what law explicitly forbids. Which is the ordinary condition of human life, in every society, with or without God.

That is exactly what razresheno captures. Not that something has been morally sanctioned, but that no prohibition stands against it — the gate is open, the barrier removed. "Permitted" in that sense is not a moral verdict. It is a description of how the space of human action has always been structured. The vast territory outside the explicit prohibitions was always permitted. Removing the divine enforcer at the outer edge does not change the structure. It only removes one layer of sanction from the acts that were already forbidden.

This is why "everything is permitted" is the more honest translation and, paradoxically, the less catastrophic claim. It is not announcing the collapse of all constraint. It is describing the ordinary condition of human possibility — everything goes, except for what most everyone agrees is prohibited. Drunken driving remains punishable whether or not there is a God or an immortal human soul. McDuff's "everything is lawful" sounds more alarming but is simply false. P&V's "everything is permitted" sounds more casual but is always true.

Which exposes Ivan's formula as far less radical than the novel treats it. Dostoevsky presents it as an abyss. Properly understood, it is a description of how human beings have always lived — the prohibited acts prohibited, the rest permitted. The novel never notices this. It agonizes over a formula that is not the catastrophe it appears to be.

My preference for "permitted" is not just about the Russian. I don’t speak that language. It is about what the novel is actually doing — or failing to do.

Dostoevsky builds a novel saturated in moral catastrophe and then refuses to supply a moral vocabulary adequate to address it. The courtroom is theater. Alyosha's universal love is real but philosophically inert — it answers nothing Ivan has said. Zosima's teachings are beautiful and beside the point. The novel asks what grounds human virtue in a world where the metaphysical guarantee has failed, and then declines to answer. It agonizes. It suffers. It dramatizes. It does not argue. It kisses our lips.

And this makes Ivan go crazy. He is seized and dragged screaming and kicking from the courtroom.

Ivan states a premise — without immortality there can be no virtue — that is demonstrably false, historically, philosophically, and existentially, and the novel never calls him on it. The devil, in Ivan's hallucination, puts the formula in its most grandiose form. In P&V:

"There is no law for God! Where God stands — there is the place of God! Where I stand, there at once will be the foremost place... 'everything is permitted,' and that's that!" (page 1017)

Ivan hurls a glass at the speaker. It is the most honest response to the formula in the entire novel. Not an argument. A glass.

Again, Ivan is wrong. He doesn't have to go crazy. Virtue lives in a soulless world, even in the face of the suffering of children — and his own life as revealed in the novel would prove it.

The shift in translations from Garnett’s 1912 “all things are lawful” to MacAndrew’s 1970 “everything is permitted” is an interesting phenomena. It is a tiny reflection of a much larger occurrence in society, one Dostoevsky probably feared. The emergence of secularism as the primary force in culture necessitated a multitude of shifts like this worldwide. “Permitted” is far more secular than “lawful” but, importantly, it is just as ethical.

Dostoevsky could have tied the phrase concretely to the Bible but he chose not to. Reason and rational expressions, even in the form of a letter from Paul, are not the key to human fulfillment. Love is. Universal love and forgiveness is a theme more fundamental to the novel that “everything is permitted.” For Dostoevsky, and, just as importantly for his publisher, that was sufficient. No need to quote scripture. Love conquers all, right?