The Brothers Karamazov

On a warm, bright day at the end of August the family gathers in Father Zosima’s cell, in the hope that the elder can settle the feud between Dmitri and his father over money. It is a disaster. Fyodor plays the clown from the moment he walks in, telling filthy stories and falling to his knees, half mocking and half sincere, to ask what he must do to gain eternal life. Zosima, sixty-five, ill and very gentle, tells him the main thing is not to lie, above all not to lie to himself.

Between scenes the elder goes out to the peasant women waiting for him. A mother has lost her last little boy; he does not tell her to stop grieving, but to weep, and to remember that her son is with God. To a rich, talkative lady, Madame Khokhlakov, who worries that she loves humanity in general but could never put up with ingratitude, he explains that real love, love in action, is hard and slow, and nothing like love in dreams.

Back in the cell, a guest repeats an idea Ivan has put about: that if you destroy people’s belief in immortality, nothing would be immoral any more, and everything would be permitted. Ivan doesn’t deny it. Zosima tells him kindly that the question is not yet settled in his own heart, and blesses him.

Dmitri arrives late, and soon he and his father are screaming at each other about money and about a woman both of them want. ‘Why is such a man alive?’ Dmitri growls. Then Zosima does something nobody understands. He goes over to Dmitri, kneels, and bows until his forehead touches the floor. Later he tells Alyosha that he saw terrible suffering waiting for Dmitri. And he gives Alyosha an order: when I die, leave the monastery and live in the world.

That afternoon, in a tumbledown summer-house in the garden next to his father’s, Dmitri pours out his heart to Alyosha over brandy, quoting Schiller. Beauty is a terrible thing, he says: God and the devil fight inside it, and the battlefield is the human heart. Then he tells his story.

Years ago, as an officer, he learned that the father of a proud young beauty, Katerina Ivanovna, was 4,500 roubles short in the regiment’s accounts and faced disgrace. Dmitri let her know that if she came to his rooms herself, alone, he would give her the money. She came. For a moment he was tempted to take his revenge for her coldness. Instead he handed her a 5,000-rouble note and bowed, and she bowed to the ground before him and ran. Later, when she inherited a fortune, she offered to marry him. They are engaged.

But Dmitri has fallen helplessly for Grushenka, a twenty-two-year-old beauty of doubtful reputation, kept by an old merchant, who lends money shrewdly and plays with men. A month ago Katerina gave him 3,000 roubles to post to her sister in Moscow, and he took Grushenka to the village of Mokroye and seemed to spend it all in one wild night. He feels like a thief. And his father, just as mad about Grushenka, keeps 3,000 roubles in a sealed envelope tied with ribbon and addressed ‘To my angel, Grushenka’, waiting for her to come. Smerdyakov knows the secret knocks that will announce her.

That evening, over brandy, Fyodor asks his two younger sons whether there is a God, and immortality. No, says Ivan. Yes, says Alyosha. Then Dmitri bursts in, convinced Grushenka is hiding there, knocks the old man down and kicks him in the face.

At Katerina’s house Alyosha watches the two women meet. Katerina gushes over Grushenka and kisses her hand; Grushenka lifts Katerina’s hand to her lips, pauses, and declines to kiss it. Katerina screams at her to get out.

Next day Alyosha comes upon schoolboys throwing stones at a small, pale, ragged boy across a ditch. When he goes to help, the boy bites his finger to the bone. This is Ilyusha Snegiryov, nine years old. Alyosha soon learns why. A week before, Dmitri dragged the boy’s father, a poor, humiliated retired captain, out of a tavern by his straggly beard, his ‘wisp of tow’, while Ilyusha ran alongside begging everyone to help, and the schoolboys have jeered at him ever since.

Katerina, meanwhile, announces that she will stay faithful to Dmitri whatever he does, and watch over him for ever, even if he marries Grushenka. These self-inflicted wounds of pride are what the book calls ‘lacerations’. Ivan, who loves her, says she has never loved Dmitri, only her own nobility, and walks out. She sends Alyosha to the captain with 200 roubles as an apology.

Captain Snegiryov lives in one room with a half-mad wife, two daughters, one of them crippled, and Ilyusha. The money would save them, and for a moment he is giddy with plans. Then he crumples the notes, throws them down, grinds them into the sand with his heel and runs off: how could he face his boy if he sold his honour? He tells Alyosha what Ilyusha said to him beside a big stone at the edge of town: when I grow up I’ll knock him down, wave my sword over him and say, ‘I could kill you, but I forgive you, so there!’

That same day, in a tavern, Ivan sits Alyosha down for the conversation the whole book has been building to. He accepts God, he says. What he cannot accept is God’s world. He has been collecting stories about children: Turkish soldiers who toss babies in the air and catch them on bayonets in front of their mothers; a five-year-old girl whose educated parents beat her and lock her all night in a freezing privy; a general who sets his hounds on an eight-year-old serf boy, in front of the boy’s mother, because the child threw a stone that hurt a dog’s paw. Perhaps one day all this will be turned into harmony. Ivan doesn’t want it; the price is too high. ‘It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.’ Asked what the general deserves, the gentle Alyosha whispers: to be shot.

Then Ivan tells him a ‘poem’ he has made up. Christ returns to Seville in the worst days of the Inquisition. He raises a dead child on the cathedral steps. The Grand Inquisitor, a cardinal of nearly ninety, has him arrested and visits his cell at night. You gave people freedom, says the old man, and freedom is a burden they cannot bear. In the desert you refused the devil’s three temptations: to turn stones into bread, to prove yourself with a miracle, to rule the kingdoms of the world. We accepted them, out of love: we give people bread, mystery and authority, and they are happy. Tomorrow I will burn you. Christ says nothing. He simply kisses the old man on his bloodless lips. The Inquisitor shudders, opens the door and tells him to go and never come back. Alyosha kisses Ivan the same way. That’s plagiarism, laughs Ivan.

At the gate of his father’s house Ivan meets Smerdyakov, who hints that he may have a long epileptic fit tomorrow, that Dmitri may come for the money, and that Ivan would do well to go away. Next morning Ivan leaves for Moscow, and Smerdyakov remarks that it is always worth while speaking to a clever man.

Alyosha hurries back to the monastery, where Zosima is dying. Among his monks, the elder talks one last time about his life. His older brother Markel, dying of consumption at seventeen, told their mother that each of us is responsible to everyone for everything. As a young officer, Zosima beat his servant the night before a duel, woke ashamed, begged the man’s forgiveness, let his opponent fire, and threw his own pistol away. Later a respected stranger confessed to him a murder committed fourteen years before. And then the teaching: love every leaf and every ray of light; judge no one; hell is the suffering of being unable to love. That evening he sinks to his knees, bows his face to the ground and dies.

The town expects a miracle: a saint’s body, people believe, does not decay. Instead, by the next afternoon, the corpse smells. The fierce old ascetic Father Ferapont, who hated Zosima’s gentleness, comes to drive out devils. Alyosha is crushed, not because he wanted a miracle, he says, but because a righteous man has been humiliated. He lets the sneering seminarian Rakitin take him to Grushenka, who has promised Rakitin twenty-five roubles to bring her the young monk.

Grushenka sits on his knee, teasing him, until she hears that Zosima is dead. Alyosha calls her his sister instead of judging her, and she is overwhelmed. She tells him a folk tale. A wicked old woman went to hell, and her guardian angel could remember only one good deed: she once gave an onion to a beggar. God let the angel hold out the onion to pull her up; other sinners clung to her; she kicked them off, and the onion broke. I have given away just one onion in my life, says Grushenka. Then word comes that her first love, the Polish officer who abandoned her five years ago, is waiting at Mokroye. She goes.

Back beside the coffin, Alyosha dozes while Father Paissy reads the gospel of the wedding at Cana, where Christ turned water into wine. In a dream Zosima comes to him, joyful, from the wedding feast: I too gave an onion, he says. Alyosha goes out under the stars, throws himself on the earth and kisses it, weeping. Three days later he leaves the monastery.

Dmitri, meanwhile, has spent two frantic days trying to raise 3,000 roubles, enough to repay Katerina, face her as an honest man and take Grushenka away. Grushenka’s old patron sends him off as a joke to a timber dealer who turns out to be dead drunk; Madame Khokhlakov, asked for a loan, advises him to dig for gold. Then he finds that Grushenka is not where he left her. He snatches a little brass pestle from her kitchen and runs to his father’s.

In the dark garden he creeps to the lit window and taps the secret signal. The old man, in his silk dressing-gown, leans out calling for Grushenka. Dmitri, sick with loathing, pulls out the pestle. Here the narrator looks away. ‘God was watching over me then,’ Dmitri says afterwards. The next thing we see is Dmitri running across the garden. Old Grigory, woken, catches him on the fence. Dmitri hits him with the pestle, jumps down, dabs at the old man’s bloody head with his handkerchief, believes he has killed him, and flees.

Spattered with blood and clutching a fat wad of notes, he redeems his pistols from a young official, Perkhotin, buys champagne and hires a troika to Mokroye. He means to see Grushenka once more and shoot himself at dawn.

At the inn he finds her with her Pole, a pompous little man with a wig, and his friend. Dmitri offers him 3,000 to clear out. The Poles cheat at cards and haggle over the money, and in a flash Grushenka sees what her first love has become. She turns to Dmitri: it is you I love. There is a wild night of music, dancing and champagne. At dawn the police walk in. Fyodor Pavlovich has been found in his room with his skull broken, and the envelope torn open and empty on the floor.

In a back room of the inn, the district prosecutor and a young investigator question Dmitri through the night, in what the book calls the three ordeals of a soul. He weeps with relief that Grigory is alive, and swears he did not kill his father. But the facts are against him. He was at the window. He had the pestle. He ran off covered in blood. That morning he was begging for a few roubles, and by evening he was throwing thousands about. Where did the money come from?

For hours he refuses to say. Then he gives up the secret that shames him more than murder would. He never spent all of Katerina’s 3,000 on that first spree. He spent half, and sewed the other 1,500 into a little rag bag that he wore round his neck for a month, meaning to give it back and stop being a thief; tonight, at the end, he tore it open. A scoundrel, he says, but not a thief. The lawyers smile and make him strip. Then old Grigory’s evidence arrives: before Dmitri ran, he saw the door from the garden into the house standing wide open. If the door was open, Dmitri must have gone in.

Exhausted, Dmitri falls asleep on a chest and dreams. He is being driven through a burnt-out village in the sleet. A thin woman by the road holds a crying baby. ‘It’s the babe,’ says the driver. Why is the babe weeping, Dmitri wants to know; why are people poor, why don’t they feed it? He wakes to find that someone has slipped a pillow under his head, and feels a joy he cannot explain. He did not kill his father, he says, but he accepts the torment of the accusation, to be made clean. Grushenka promises to follow him wherever they send him, and they drive him away.

Two months pass, and it is November. Ilyusha is dying. Alyosha has made peace between him and the schoolboys, who now crowd round his bed. The one who stays away is Kolya Krasotkin, thirteen, a clever little show-off who once lay between the rails while a train passed over him. Ilyusha was his friend until, egged on by Smerdyakov, he fed a starving dog a lump of bread with a pin in it; the dog ran off howling, and Ilyusha is sure he killed her. At last Kolya comes, with a shaggy dog, Perezvon, which turns out to be the very same dog, found and secretly trained. Ilyusha’s joy is unbearable to watch. A grand doctor from Moscow says nothing can be done, unless the patient goes to Syracuse.

In prison Dmitri tells Alyosha that a new man has risen in him, one who could sing a hymn to God even underground in the Siberian mines. Ivan, back from Moscow, is falling apart. Alyosha tells him, without quite knowing why, that it was not he who killed their father.

Ivan visits Smerdyakov three times. The third time Smerdyakov, ill and almost indifferent, tells him the truth. He faked his fit. After Dmitri fled, he gave the old man the secret knocks, said Grushenka had come, and killed him with an iron paperweight. He hands Ivan the 3,000 roubles from his stocking. But you are the real murderer, he says: you taught me that everything is permitted, and you went away so that it could happen. Ivan resolves to tell the court.

At home, feverish, he finds a visitor on his sofa: a shabby Russian gentleman of about fifty, in check trousers a little too tight, with the easy manners of a poor relation. It is the devil, and he mocks Ivan with Ivan’s own ideas. A knock at the window ends the nightmare. It is Alyosha: Smerdyakov has hanged himself. His note says only, ‘I destroy my life of my own will and desire, so as to throw no blame on any one.’ Not a word about the murder.

At the sensational trial Katerina first tells the court, nobly, how Dmitri once gave her 5,000 roubles and bowed. Then Ivan, ill, produces the bundle of notes. Smerdyakov killed our father, he says, and I put him up to it. ‘Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?’ He begins raving about the devil and is dragged out screaming. Katerina, desperate to save Ivan, turns on Dmitri. She hands the judges a drunken letter he wrote her before the murder, swearing he would kill his father once Ivan had gone away. It looks like mathematical proof.

The prosecutor sees in the Karamazovs the whole of Russia, a troika galloping who knows where. The famous Petersburg defence lawyer, Fetyukovich, argues that no one ever saw the money, so there was no robbery, and no proof of murder; and could such a man even be called a father? The jury of peasants and small officials stands firm: guilty on every count. People on the steps say he will get twenty years in the mines.

Five days later Ivan lies in brain fever, having planned Dmitri’s escape to America with Grushenka. Katerina visits Dmitri in the prison hospital. Love is over, she tells him, but the past is painfully dear to her; for a moment they love each other again. Grushenka will not forgive her.

That same day Ilyusha is buried. The captain crumbles bread on the grave so that the sparrows will come, as the boy asked. Afterwards, beside the big stone, Alyosha speaks to the dozen boys. Remember this day, he says; one good memory from childhood may be enough to save a person. Let us be kind, then honest, and never forget each other. Will we really rise again and see each other, even Ilyusha? Kolya asks. Certainly, says Alyosha, half laughing and half in rapture. Then they go off hand in hand to the funeral dinner, to eat pancakes, shouting: ‘Hurrah for Karamazov!’

In a tavern, Ivan makes his case to Alyosha. He has collected true stories of children tortured by soldiers, by parents, by a general who set his hounds on a little serf boy. No future harmony is worth one child’s tears, he says; he does not reject God, he just respectfully returns his ticket. Then he tells his ‘poem’ of the Grand Inquisitor, an old cardinal who arrests the returning Christ and tells him that people don’t want freedom, only bread, miracles and someone to obey. Christ answers only with a kiss. Smerdyakov hints that Ivan should leave town; Ivan does.

Alyosha has troubles of his own. Ilyusha, a fierce, sick nine-year-old, bites his finger: Dmitri had dragged the boy’s poor father, Captain Snegiryov, out of a tavern by his beard. Zosima dies, and instead of the expected miracle his body quickly starts to smell. Shaken, Alyosha visits Grushenka, who is touched by his kindness and tells him the folk tale of a sinner who once gave an onion. That night, dreaming of the wedding at Cana, Alyosha goes out under the stars, kisses the earth and finds his faith again.

Dmitri spends two frantic days trying to raise 3,000 roubles. That night he creeps into his father’s garden with a brass pestle. At the window he is overwhelmed with hatred, but something stops him. As he flees, he strikes down the old servant Grigory, and runs off covered in blood. Then he rushes, with a wad of money, to the village of Mokroye, where Grushenka has gone to meet her first love, a Polish officer. The Pole turns out to be a cheat, and Grushenka chooses Dmitri. At dawn the police arrive: Fyodor has been murdered, and the money is gone. Everything points to Dmitri, who swears that the money was half of Katerina’s 3,000, kept sewn in a bag round his neck. Nobody believes him.

Two months later, Ivan visits Smerdyakov, who confesses: he killed Fyodor, and Ivan, with his ‘everything is lawful’, was the real murderer. He hands over the money and hangs himself that night. Ivan, delirious, is visited by the devil. At the trial Ivan produces the money and raves; Katerina, to save him, produces a drunken letter from Dmitri threatening to kill his father. The jury finds Dmitri guilty. He accepts his punishment, as if suffering for everyone, while friends plot his escape to America.

Meanwhile little Ilyusha has died. After the funeral Alyosha gathers the schoolboys at a big stone where Ilyusha once vowed to defend his father’s honour, and asks them to be kind, to be honest, and never to forget each other. They go off together, shouting ‘Hurrah for Karamazov!’