“If Thou sendest me to hell, I shall love Thee there”

“If Thou sendest me to hell, I shall love Thee there” is the most forceful turn in a prayer spoken by Dmitri Karamazov as he races toward the woman he loves. He does not ask to be declared innocent: he says he has condemned himself, calls himself a wretch, and asks God not to condemn him. The phrase imagines love persisting even in hell, where punishment cannot extinguish it.

The Prayer in the Carriage

Dmitri’s driver is frightened by his strange talk, but Dmitri does not hear him. He is praying frantically and muttering to himself, absorbed in an appeal that moves between fear of judgment and a declaration of devotion. The driver’s alarm frames the prayer as an outwardly unsettling scene; its intimate address to God belongs to Dmitri alone.

Dmitri asks to pass by God’s judgment and repeats that he has condemned himself. His plea is not a claim that his conduct is blameless. Instead, he makes his love for God the ground on which he begs not to be condemned: even as he names himself a wretch, he insists that he loves the Lord. The repeated appeal gives the prayer its urgent, almost breathless structure.

Love Beyond Condemnation

The sentence about hell carries the prayer to its extremity. Dmitri imagines that even if God sends him there, he will continue to love God and cry out his love forever. Damnation is not presented as an escape from judgment; it is the imagined condition in which his devotion would still endure. The language holds contrition and defiance together: Dmitri accepts that he is culpable, yet cannot conceive of abandoning the love that makes him plead.

That insistence is immediately joined to a more earthly desire. Dmitri asks to be allowed to love “to the end,” and specifies a brief reprieve of five hours, until the first light of day. He loves the “queen of my soul,” says he cannot help loving her, and imagines galloping up to her. The prayer therefore links devotion to God with an urgent, passionate attachment that Dmitri recognizes he cannot simply put aside.

The Farewell He Imagines

Dmitri’s imagined meeting ends not with a demand that the woman choose him, but with a farewell. He pictures himself falling before her and telling her she is right to pass on and leave him, asking her to forget her victim and not fret over him. That anticipated surrender gives the prayer a painful counterpoint: he longs to reach her, yet rehearses her departure and his own abandonment.

The phrase endures as the prayer’s defining expression because it gathers its opposing movements into one declaration. Dmitri begs for mercy while acknowledging his lawlessness, hopes for a few hours of love while imagining rejection, and speaks of hell without withdrawing his love for God. Its force lies not in resolving these conflicts, but in making continued love the one thing he insists can survive them.