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'The Grand Inquisitor' (hereafter GI), the story told by Ivan Karamazov to his brother Alesha in The Brothers Karamazov (1880), is often claimed as a forerunner, if not the inspiration, of such key dystopian works as Zamiatin's We (1921), Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949): 'If it is true', observes one commentator, 'that "the Russian novel did come out of [Gogol's] Cloak", it could be said with equal justice that the central thematic statement for twentiethcentury dystopian fiction [...] came out of Dostoevski's "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor'".1 Another claims more specifically that Mustapha Mond and O'Brien (the respective authority figures in Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four) 'do their work in the shadow of the Grand Inquisitor'.2 The link has been mainly thought of as thematic: the 'freedom or happiness' dilemma is fundamental to GI and it is a core concern in many twentieth-century dystopias. It may also be read, to use William Leatherbarrow's phrase, as 'a startlingly prescient anticipation' of the modem totalitarian state and, by extension, nightmarish fictionalizations of such states.3
In this chapter I am concerned with something rather more structurally specific that is common to GI and a large number of dystopian novels and films, namely what Krishan Kumar calls the Grand Inquisitor 'scene'.4 This is the moment when the ruler of the dystopian state, or his representative, confronts a rebellious subject or dissenter and explains to him or her the rationale behind the apparently unjust and oppressive regime. In more abstract terms the confrontation can be seen as embodying '[t]he conflict between freedom of thought and an allpowerful, all-knowing elite'.5 Gary Saul Morson suggests that Zamiatin and Huxley are indebted to GI for the equivalent scenes in their novels,6 which may indeed be so, although, from the frequency with which this scene persists in replicating itself in dystopian works of all kinds - and in many permutations - we might equally conclude that it is a sort of rhetorical precondition for this kind of text, a precondition to which GI also conforms. Arguably, too, it is not the first embodiment of this confrontation: Francis Comford offers an ingenious parallel with Plato and Socrates: the former being the inquisitor and the latter his prisoner.7 More obviously,...