Famously, Dostoevsky supplied Ivan with true accounts of children tortured and murdered: Turks tearing babies from their mothers» wombs, impaling infants on bayonets, firing pistols into their mouths; parents savagely flogging their children; a five - year - old -
girl tortured by her mother and father, her mouth filled with excrement, locked at night in an
outhouse, weeping her supplications to «dear kind God» in the darkness; an eight - year - old serf child torn to pieces by his master's dogs for a small accidental transgression.