Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita (1997) -
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realm of reason there can be no proof of God's existence.'
'Bravo!' cried the foreigner. 'Bravo! You have perfectly repeated
restless old Immanuel's[19] thought in this regard. But here's
the hitch: he roundly demolished all five proofs, and then, as if mocking
himself, constructed a sixth of his own.'
'Kant's proof,' the learned editor objected with a subtle smile, 'is
equally unconvincing. Not for nothing did Schiller say that the Kantian
reasoning on this question can satisfy only slaves, and Strauss simply
laughed at this proof.' Berlioz spoke, thinking all the while: 'But, anyhow,
who is he? And why does he speak Russian so well?'
They ought to take this Kant and give him a three-year stretch in
Solovki[22] for such proofs!' Ivan Nikolaevich plumped quite
unexpectedly.
'Ivan!' Berlioz whispered, embarrassed.
But the suggestion of sending Kant to Solovki not only did not shock
the foreigner, but even sent him into raptures.
'Precisely, precisely,' he cried, and his green left eye, turned to
Berlioz, flashed. 'Just the place for him! Didn't I tell him that time at
breakfast:
"As you will. Professor, but what you've thought up doesn't hang
together. It's clever, maybe, but mighty unclear. You'll be laughed at."'
Berlioz goggled his eyes. 'At breakfast... to Kant? . . . What is this
drivel?' he thought.
'But,' the oudander went on, unembarrassed by Berlioz's amazement and
addressing the poet, 'sending him to Solovki is unfeasible, for the simple
reason that he has been abiding for over a hundred years now in places
considerably more remote than Solovki, and to extract him from there is in
no way possible, I assure you.'
'Too bad!' the feisty poet responded.
'Yes, too bad!' the stranger agreed, his eye flashing, and went on:
'But here is a question that is troubling me: if there is no God, then,