The Brothers Karamazov
The Brothers KaramazovPART IBOOK I: THE HISTORY OF A FAMILYCHAPTER 1: FYODOR PAVLOVITCH KARAMAZOVCHAPTER 2: HE GETS RID OF HIS ELDEST SONCHAPTER 3: THE SECOND MARRIAGE AND THE SECOND FAMILYCHAPTER 4: THE THIRD SON, ALYOSHACHAPTER 5: ELDERSBOOK II: AN UNFORTUNATE GATHERINGCHAPTER 1: THEY ARRIVE AT THE MONASTERYCHAPTER 2: THE OLD BUFFOONCHAPTER 3: PEASANT WOMEN WHO HAVE FAITHCHAPTER 4: A LADY OF LITTLE FAITHCHAPTER 5: SO BE IT! SO BE IT!CHAPTER 6: WHY IS SUCH A MAN ALIVE?CHAPTER 7: A YOUNG MAN BENT ON A CAREERCHAPTER 8: THE SCANDALOUS SCENEBOOK III: THE SENSUALISTSCHAPTER 1: IN THE SERVANTS' QUARTERSCHAPTER 2: LIZAVETACHAPTER 3: THE CONFESSION OF A PASSIONATE HEART — IN VERSECHAPTER 4: THE CONFESSION OF A PASSIONATE HEART — IN ANECDOTECHAPTER 5: THE CONFESSION OF A PASSIONATE HEART — 'HEELS UP"CHAPTER 6: SMERDYAKOVCHAPTER 7: THE CONTROVERSYCHAPTER 8: OVER THE BRANDYCHAPTER 9: THE SENSUALISTSCHAPTER 10: BOTH TOGETHERCHAPTER 11: ANOTHER REPUTATION RUINEDPART IIBOOK IV: LACERATIONSCHAPTER 1: FATHER FERAPONTCHAPTER 2: AT HIS FATHER'SCHAPTER 3: A MEETING WITH THE SCHOOLBOYSCHAPTER 4: AT THE HOHLAKOVS'CHAPTER 5: A LACERATION IN THE DRAWING-ROOMCHAPTER 6: A LACERATION IN THE COTTAGECHAPTER 7: AND IN THE OPEN AIRBOOK V: PRO AND CONTRACHAPTER 1: THE ENGAGEMENTCHAPTER 2: SMERDYAKOV WITH A GUITARCHAPTER 3: THE BROTHERS MAKE FRIENDSCHAPTER 4: REBELLIONCHAPTER 5: THE GRAND INQUISITORCHAPTER 6: FOR AWHILE A VERY OBSCURE ONECHAPTER 7: "IT'S ALWAYS WORTH WHILE SPEAKING TO A CLEVER MAN"BOOK VI: THE RUSSIAN MONK.CHAPTER 1: FATHER ZOSSIMA AND HIS VISITORSCHAPTER 2: THE DUELCHAPTER 3: CONVERSATIONS AND EXHORTATIONS OF FATHER ZOSSIMAPART IIIBOOK VII: ALYOSHACHAPTER 1: THE BREATH OF CORRUPTIONCHAPTER 2: A CRITICAL MOMENTCHAPTER 3: AN ONIONCHAPTER 4: CANA OF GALILEEBOOK VIII: MITYACHAPTER 1: KUZMA SAMSONOVCHAPTER 2: LYAGAVYCHAPTER 3: GOLD MINESCHAPTER 4: IN THE DARKCHAPTER 5: A SUDDEN RESOLUTIONCHAPTER 6: "I AM COMING, TOO!'CHAPTER 7: THE FIRST AND RIGHTFUL LOVERCHAPTER 8: DELIRIUMBOOK IX: THE PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATIONCHAPTER 1: THE BEGINNING OF PERHOTIN'S OFFICIAL CAREERCHAPTER 2: THE ALARMCHAPTER 3: THE SUFFERINGS OF A SOUL THE FIRST ORDEALCHAPTER 4: THE SECOND ORDEALCHAPTER 5: THE THIRD ORDEALCHAPTER 6: THE PROSECUTOR CATCHES MITYACHAPTER 7: MITYA'S GREAT SECRET RECEIVED WITH HISSESCHAPTER 8: THE EVIDENCES OF THE WITNESSES. THE BABECHAPTER 9: THEY CARRY MITYA AWAYPART IVBOOK X: THE BOYSCHAPTER 1: KOLYA KRASSOTKINCHAPTER 2: CHILDRENCHAPTER 3: THE SCHOOLBOYCHAPTER 4: THE LOST DOGCHAPTER 5: BY ILUSHA'S BEDSIDECHAPTER 6: PRECOCITYCHAPTER 7: ILUSHABOOK XI: IVANCHAPTER 1: AT GRUSHENKA'SCHAPTER 2: THE INJURED FOOTCHAPTER 3: A LITTLE DEMONCHAPTER 4: A HYMN AND A SECRETCHAPTER 5: NOT YOU, NOT YOU!CHAPTER 6: THE FIRST INTERVIEW WITH SMERDYAKOVCHAPTER 7: THE SECOND VISIT TO SMERDYAKOVCHAPTER 8: THE THIRD AND LAST INTERVIEW WITH SMERDYAKOVCHAPTER 9: THE DEVIL. IVAN'S NIGHTMARECHAPTER 10: "IT WAS HE WHO SAID THAT"BOOK XIICHAPTER 1: THE FATAL DAYCHAPTER 2: DANGEROUS WITNESSESCHAPTER 3: THE MEDICAL EXPERTS AND A POUND OF NUTSCHAPTER 4: FORTUNE SMILES ON MITYACHAPTER 5: A SUDDEN CATASTROPHECHAPTER 6: THE PROSECUTOR'S SPEECH. SKETCHES OF CHARACTERCHAPTER 7: AN HISTORICAL SURVEYCHAPTER 8: A TREATISE ON SMERDYAKOVCHAPTER 9: THE GALLOPING TROIKA. THE END OF THE PROSECUTOR'S SPEECHCHAPTER 10: THE SPEECH FOR THE DEFENCE. AN ARGUMENT THAT CUTS BOTH WAYSCHAPTER 11: THERE WAS NO MONEY. THERE WAS NO ROBBERYCHAPTER 12: AND THERE WAS NO MURDER EITHERCHAPTER 13: A CORRUPTER OF THOUGHTCHAPTER 14: THE PEASANTS STAND FIRMEPILOGUECHAPTER 1: PLANS FOR MITYA'S ESCAPECHAPTER 2: FOR A MOMENT THE LIE BECOMES TRUTHCHAPTER 3: ILUSHA'S FUNERAL. THE SPEECH AT THE STONECopyright
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
PART I
BOOK I: THE HISTORY OF A FAMILY
CHAPTER 1: FYODOR PAVLOVITCH KARAMAZOV
Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor
Pavlovitch Karamazov, a land owner well known in our district in
his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and
tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall
describe in its proper place. For the present I will only say that
this "landowner"—for so we used to call him, although he hardly
spent a day of his life on his own estate—was a strange type, yet
one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and
at the same time senseless. But he was one of those senseless
persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly
affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else. Fyodor Pavlovitch,
for instance, began with next to nothing; his estate was of the
smallest; he ran to dine at other men's tables, and fastened on
them as a toady, yet at his death it appeared that he had a hundred
thousand roubles in hard cash. At the same time, he was all his
life one of the most senseless, fantastical fellows in the whole
district. I repeat, it was not stupidity—the majority of these
fantastical fellows are shrewd and intelligent enough—but just
senselessness, and a peculiar national form of it.He was married twice, and had three sons, the eldest, Dmitri,
by his first wife, and two, Ivan and Alexey, by his second. Fyodor
Pavlovitch's first wife, Adelaïda Ivanovna, belonged to a fairly
rich and distinguished noble family, also landowners in our
district, the Miüsovs. How it came to pass that an heiress, who was
also a beauty, and moreover one of those vigorous, intelligent
girls, so common in this generation, but sometimes also to be found
in the last, could have married such a worthless, puny weakling, as
we all called him, I won't attempt to explain. I knew a young lady
of the last "romantic" generation who after some years of an
enigmatic passion for a gentleman, whom she might quite easily have
married at any moment, invented insuperable obstacles to their
union, and ended by throwing herself one stormy night into a rather
deep and rapid river from a high bank, almost a precipice, and so
perished, entirely to satisfy her own caprice, and to be like
Shakespeare's Ophelia. Indeed, if this precipice, a chosen and
favorite spot of hers, had been less picturesque, if there had been
a prosaic flat bank in its place, most likely the suicide would
never have taken place. This is a fact, and probably there have
been not a few similar instances in the last two or three
generations. Adelaïda Ivanovna Miüsov's action was similarly, no
doubt, an echo of other people's ideas, and was due to the
irritation caused by lack of mental freedom. She wanted, perhaps,
to show her feminine independence, to override class distinctions
and the despotism of her family. And a pliable imagination
persuaded her, we must suppose, for a brief moment, that Fyodor
Pavlovitch, in spite of his parasitic position, was one of the bold
and ironical spirits of that progressive epoch, though he was, in
fact, an ill-natured buffoon and nothing more. What gave the
marriage piquancy was that it was preceded by an elopement, and
this greatly captivated Adelaïda Ivanovna's fancy. Fyodor
Pavlovitch's position at the time made him specially eager for any
such enterprise, for he was passionately anxious to make a career
in one way or another. To attach himself to a good family and
obtain a dowry was an alluring prospect. As for mutual love it did
not exist apparently, either in the bride or in him, in spite of
Adelaïda Ivanovna's beauty. This was, perhaps, a unique case of the
kind in the life of Fyodor Pavlovitch, who was always of a
voluptuous temper, and ready to run after any petticoat on the
slightest encouragement. She seems to have been the only woman who
made no particular appeal to his senses.Immediately after the elopement Adelaïda Ivanovna discerned
in a flash that she had no feeling for her husband but contempt.
The marriage accordingly showed itself in its true colors with
extraordinary rapidity. Although the family accepted the event
pretty quickly and apportioned the runaway bride her dowry, the
husband and wife began to lead a most disorderly life, and there
were everlasting scenes between them. It was said that the young
wife showed incomparably more generosity and dignity than Fyodor
Pavlovitch, who, as is now known, got hold of all her money up to
twenty-five thousand roubles as soon as she received it, so that
those thousands were lost to her for ever. The little village and
the rather fine town house which formed part of her dowry he did
his utmost for a long time to transfer to his name, by means of
some deed of conveyance. He would probably have succeeded, merely
from her moral fatigue and desire to get rid of him, and from the
contempt and loathing he aroused by his persistent and shameless
importunity. But, fortunately, Adelaïda Ivanovna's family
intervened and circumvented his greediness. It is known for a fact
that frequent fights took place between the husband and wife, but
rumor had it that Fyodor Pavlovitch did not beat his wife but was
beaten by her, for she was a hot-tempered, bold, dark-browed,
impatient woman, possessed of remarkable physical strength.
Finally, she left the house and ran away from Fyodor Pavlovitch
with a destitute divinity student, leaving Mitya, a child of three
years old, in her husband's hands. Immediately Fyodor Pavlovitch
introduced a regular harem into the house, and abandoned himself to
orgies of drunkenness. In the intervals he used to drive all over
the province, complaining tearfully to each and all of Adelaïda
Ivanovna's having left him, going into details too disgraceful for
a husband to mention in regard to his own married life. What seemed
to gratify him and flatter his self-love most was to play the
ridiculous part of the injured husband, and to parade his woes with
embellishments."One would think that you'd got a promotion, Fyodor
Pavlovitch, you seem so pleased in spite of your sorrow," scoffers
said to him. Many even added that he was glad of a new comic part
in which to play the buffoon, and that it was simply to make it
funnier that he pretended to be unaware of his ludicrous position.
But, who knows, it may have been simplicity. At last he succeeded
in getting on the track of his runaway wife. The poor woman turned
out to be in Petersburg, where she had gone with her divinity
student, and where she had thrown herself into a life of complete
emancipation. Fyodor Pavlovitch at once began bustling about,
making preparations to go to Petersburg, with what object he could
not himself have said. He would perhaps have really gone; but
having determined to do so he felt at once entitled to fortify
himself for the journey by another bout of reckless drinking. And
just at that time his wife's family received the news of her death
in Petersburg. She had died quite suddenly in a garret, according
to one story, of typhus, or as another version had it, of
starvation. Fyodor Pavlovitch was drunk when he heard of his wife's
death, and the story is that he ran out into the street and began
shouting with joy, raising his hands to Heaven: "Lord, now lettest
Thou Thy servant depart in peace," but others say he wept without
restraint like a little child, so much so that people were sorry
for him, in spite of the repulsion he inspired. It is quite
possible that both versions were true, that he rejoiced at his
release, and at the same time wept for her who released him. As a
general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naïve and
simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are,
too.
CHAPTER 2: HE GETS RID OF HIS ELDEST SON
You can easily imagine what a father such a man could be and
how he would bring up his children. His behavior as a father was
exactly what might be expected. He completely abandoned the child
of his marriage with Adelaïda Ivanovna, not from malice, nor
because of his matrimonial grievances, but simply because he forgot
him. While he was wearying every one with his tears and complaints,
and turning his house into a sink of debauchery, a faithful servant
of the family, Grigory, took the three-year-old Mitya into his
care. If he hadn't looked after him there would have been no one
even to change the baby's little shirt.It happened moreover that the child's relations on his
mother's side forgot him too at first. His grandfather was no
longer living, his widow, Mitya's grandmother, had moved to Moscow,
and was seriously ill, while his daughters were married, so that
Mitya remained for almost a whole year in old Grigory's charge and
lived with him in the servant's cottage. But if his father had
remembered him (he could not, indeed, have been altogether unaware
of his existence) he would have sent him back to the cottage, as
the child would only have been in the way of his debaucheries. But
a cousin of Mitya's mother, Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miüsov, happened
to return from Paris. He lived for many years afterwards abroad,
but was at that time quite a young man, and distinguished among the
Miüsovs as a man of enlightened ideas and of European culture, who
had been in the capitals and abroad. Towards the end of his life he
became a Liberal of the type common in the forties and fifties. In
the course of his career he had come into contact with many of the
most Liberal men of his epoch, both in Russia and abroad. He had
known Proudhon and Bakunin personally, and in his declining years
was very fond of describing the three days of the Paris Revolution
of February 1848, hinting that he himself had almost taken part in
the fighting on the barricades. This was one of the most grateful
recollections of his youth. He had an independent property of about
a thousand souls, to reckon in the old style. His splendid estate
lay on the outskirts of our little town and bordered on the lands
of our famous monastery, with which Pyotr Alexandrovitch began an
endless lawsuit, almost as soon as he came into the estate,
concerning the rights of fishing in the river or wood-cutting in
the forest, I don't know exactly which. He regarded it as his duty
as a citizen and a man of culture to open an attack upon the
"clericals." Hearing all about Adelaïda Ivanovna, whom he, of
course, remembered, and in whom he had at one time been interested,
and learning of the existence of Mitya, he intervened, in spite of
all his youthful indignation and contempt for Fyodor Pavlovitch. He
made the latter's acquaintance for the first time, and told him
directly that he wished to undertake the child's education. He used
long afterwards to tell as a characteristic touch, that when he
began to speak of Mitya, Fyodor Pavlovitch looked for some time as
though he did not understand what child he was talking about, and
even as though he was surprised to hear that he had a little son in
the house. The story may have been exaggerated, yet it must have
been something like the truth.Fyodor Pavlovitch was all his life fond of acting, of
suddenly playing an unexpected part, sometimes without any motive
for doing so, and even to his own direct disadvantage, as, for
instance, in the present case. This habit, however, is
characteristic of a very great number of people, some of them very
clever ones, not like Fyodor Pavlovitch. Pyotr Alexandrovitch
carried the business through vigorously, and was appointed, with
Fyodor Pavlovitch, joint guardian of the child, who had a small
property, a house and land, left him by his mother. Mitya did, in
fact, pass into this cousin's keeping, but as the latter had no
family of his own, and after securing the revenues of his estates
was in haste to return at once to Paris, he left the boy in charge
of one of his cousins, a lady living in Moscow. It came to pass
that, settling permanently in Paris he, too, forgot the child,
especially when the Revolution of February broke out, making an
impression on his mind that he remembered all the rest of his life.
The Moscow lady died, and Mitya passed into the care of one of her
married daughters. I believe he changed his home a fourth time
later on. I won't enlarge upon that now, as I shall have much to
tell later of Fyodor Pavlovitch's firstborn, and must confine
myself now to the most essential facts about him, without which I
could not begin my story.In the first place, this Mitya, or rather Dmitri
Fyodorovitch, was the only one of Fyodor Pavlovitch's three sons
who grew up in the belief that he had property, and that he would
be independent on coming of age. He spent an irregular boyhood and
youth. He did not finish his studies at the gymnasium, he got into
a military school, then went to the Caucasus, was promoted, fought
a duel, and was degraded to the ranks, earned promotion again, led
a wild life, and spent a good deal of money. He did not begin to
receive any income from Fyodor Pavlovitch until he came of age, and
until then got into debt. He saw and knew his father, Fyodor
Pavlovitch, for the first time on coming of age, when he visited
our neighborhood on purpose to settle with him about his property.
He seems not to have liked his father. He did not stay long with
him, and made haste to get away, having only succeeded in obtaining
a sum of money, and entering into an agreement for future payments
from the estate, of the revenues and value of which he was unable
(a fact worthy of note), upon this occasion, to get a statement
from his father. Fyodor Pavlovitch remarked for the first time then
(this, too, should be noted) that Mitya had a vague and exaggerated
idea of his property. Fyodor Pavlovitch was very well satisfied
with this, as it fell in with his own designs. He gathered only
that the young man was frivolous, unruly, of violent passions,
impatient, and dissipated, and that if he could only obtain ready
money he would be satisfied, although only, of course, for a short
time. So Fyodor Pavlovitch began to take advantage of this fact,
sending him from time to time small doles, installments. In the
end, when four years later, Mitya, losing patience, came a second
time to our little town to settle up once for all with his father,
it turned out to his amazement that he had nothing, that it was
difficult to get an account even, that he had received the whole
value of his property in sums of money from Fyodor Pavlovitch, and
was perhaps even in debt to him, that by various agreements into
which he had, of his own desire, entered at various previous dates,
he had no right to expect anything more, and so on, and so on. The
young man was overwhelmed, suspected deceit and cheating, and was
almost beside himself. And, indeed, this circumstance led to the
catastrophe, the account of which forms the subject of my first
introductory story, or rather the external side of it. But before I
pass to that story I must say a little of Fyodor Pavlovitch's other
two sons, and of their origin.
CHAPTER 3: THE SECOND MARRIAGE AND THE SECOND FAMILY
Very shortly after getting his four-year-old Mitya off his
hands Fyodor Pavlovitch married a second time. His second marriage
lasted eight years. He took this second wife, Sofya Ivanovna, also
a very young girl, from another province, where he had gone upon
some small piece of business in company with a Jew. Though Fyodor
Pavlovitch was a drunkard and a vicious debauchee he never
neglected investing his capital, and managed his business affairs
very successfully, though, no doubt, not over-scrupulously. Sofya
Ivanovna was the daughter of an obscure deacon, and was left from
childhood an orphan without relations. She grew up in the house of
a general's widow, a wealthy old lady of good position, who was at
once her benefactress and tormentor. I do not know the details, but
I have only heard that the orphan girl, a meek and gentle creature,
was once cut down from a halter in which she was hanging from a
nail in the loft, so terrible were her sufferings from the caprice
and everlasting nagging of this old woman, who was apparently not
bad-hearted but had become an insufferable tyrant through
idleness.Fyodor Pavlovitch made her an offer; inquiries were made
about him and he was refused. But again, as in his first marriage,
he proposed an elopement to the orphan girl. There is very little
doubt that she would not on any account have married him if she had
known a little more about him in time. But she lived in another
province; besides, what could a little girl of sixteen know about
it, except that she would be better at the bottom of the river than
remaining with her benefactress. So the poor child exchanged a
benefactress for a benefactor. Fyodor Pavlovitch did not get a
penny this time, for the general's widow was furious. She gave them
nothing and cursed them both. But he had not reckoned on a dowry;
what allured him was the remarkable beauty of the innocent girl,
above all her innocent appearance, which had a peculiar attraction
for a vicious profligate, who had hitherto admired only the coarser
types of feminine beauty."Those innocent eyes slit my soul up like a razor," he used
to say afterwards, with his loathsome snigger. In a man so depraved
this might, of course, mean no more than sensual attraction. As he
had received no dowry with his wife, and had, so to speak, taken
her "from the halter," he did not stand on ceremony with her.
Making her feel that she had "wronged" him, he took advantage of
her phenomenal meekness and submissiveness to trample on the
elementary decencies of marriage. He gathered loose women into his
house, and carried on orgies of debauchery in his wife's presence.
To show what a pass things had come to, I may mention that Grigory,
the gloomy, stupid, obstinate, argumentative servant, who had
always hated his first mistress, Adelaïda Ivanovna, took the side
of his new mistress. He championed her cause, abusing Fyodor
Pavlovitch in a manner little befitting a servant, and on one
occasion broke up the revels and drove all the disorderly women out
of the house. In the end this unhappy young woman, kept in terror
from her childhood, fell into that kind of nervous disease which is
most frequently found in peasant women who are said to be
"possessed by devils." At times after terrible fits of hysterics
she even lost her reason. Yet she bore Fyodor Pavlovitch two sons,
Ivan and Alexey, the eldest in the first year of marriage and the
second three years later. When she died, little Alexey was in his
fourth year, and, strange as it seems, I know that he remembered
his mother all his life, like a dream, of course. At her death
almost exactly the same thing happened to the two little boys as to
their elder brother, Mitya. They were completely forgotten and
abandoned by their father. They were looked after by the same
Grigory and lived in his cottage, where they were found by the
tyrannical old lady who had brought up their mother. She was still
alive, and had not, all those eight years, forgotten the insult
done her. All that time she was obtaining exact information as to
her Sofya's manner of life, and hearing of her illness and hideous
surroundings she declared aloud two or three times to her
retainers:"It serves her right. God has punished her for her
ingratitude."Exactly three months after Sofya Ivanovna's death the
general's widow suddenly appeared in our town, and went straight to
Fyodor Pavlovitch's house. She spent only half an hour in the town
but she did a great deal. It was evening. Fyodor Pavlovitch, whom
she had not seen for those eight years, came in to her drunk. The
story is that instantly upon seeing him, without any sort of
explanation, she gave him two good, resounding slaps on the face,
seized him by a tuft of hair, and shook him three times up and
down. Then, without a word, she went straight to the cottage to the
two boys. Seeing, at the first glance, that they were unwashed and
in dirty linen, she promptly gave Grigory, too, a box on the ear,
and announcing that she would carry off both the children she
wrapped them just as they were in a rug, put them in the carriage,
and drove off to her own town. Grigory accepted the blow like a
devoted slave, without a word, and when he escorted the old lady to
her carriage he made her a low bow and pronounced impressively
that, "God would repay her for the orphans." "You are a blockhead
all the same," the old lady shouted to him as she drove
away.Fyodor Pavlovitch, thinking it over, decided that it was a
good thing, and did not refuse the general's widow his formal
consent to any proposition in regard to his children's education.
As for the slaps she had given him, he drove all over the town
telling the story.It happened that the old lady died soon after this, but she
left the boys in her will a thousand roubles each "for their
instruction, and so that all be spent on them exclusively, with the
condition that it be so portioned out as to last till they are
twenty-one, for it is more than adequate provision for such
children. If other people think fit to throw away their money, let
them." I have not read the will myself, but I heard there was
something queer of the sort, very whimsically expressed. The
principal heir, Yefim Petrovitch Polenov, the Marshal of Nobility
of the province, turned out, however, to be an honest man. Writing
to Fyodor Pavlovitch, and discerning at once that he could extract
nothing from him for his children's education (though the latter
never directly refused but only procrastinated as he always did in
such cases, and was, indeed, at times effusively sentimental),
Yefim Petrovitch took a personal interest in the orphans. He became
especially fond of the younger, Alexey, who lived for a long while
as one of his family. I beg the reader to note this from the
beginning. And to Yefim Petrovitch, a man of a generosity and
humanity rarely to be met with, the young people were more indebted
for their education and bringing up than to any one. He kept the
two thousand roubles left to them by the general's widow intact, so
that by the time they came of age their portions had been doubled
by the accumulation of interest. He educated them both at his own
expense, and certainly spent far more than a thousand roubles upon
each of them. I won't enter into a detailed account of their
boyhood and youth, but will only mention a few of the most
important events. Of the elder, Ivan, I will only say that he grew
into a somewhat morose and reserved, though far from timid boy. At
ten years old he had realized that they were living not in their
own home but on other people's charity, and that their father was a
man of whom it was disgraceful to speak. This boy began very early,
almost in his infancy (so they say at least), to show a brilliant
and unusual aptitude for learning. I don't know precisely why, but
he left the family of Yefim Petrovitch when he was hardly thirteen,
entering a Moscow gymnasium, and boarding with an experienced and
celebrated teacher, an old friend of Yefim Petrovitch. Ivan used to
declare afterwards that this was all due to the "ardor for good
works" of Yefim Petrovitch, who was captivated by the idea that the
boy's genius should be trained by a teacher of genius. But neither
Yefim Petrovitch nor this teacher was living when the young man
finished at the gymnasium and entered the university. As Yefim
Petrovitch had made no provision for the payment of the tyrannical
old lady's legacy, which had grown from one thousand to two, it was
delayed, owing to formalities inevitable in Russia, and the young
man was in great straits for the first two years at the university,
as he was forced to keep himself all the time he was studying. It
must be noted that he did not even attempt to communicate with his
father, perhaps from pride, from contempt for him, or perhaps from
his cool common sense, which told him that from such a father he
would get no real assistance. However that may have been, the young
man was by no means despondent and succeeded in getting work, at
first giving sixpenny lessons and afterwards getting paragraphs on
street incidents into the newspapers under the signature of
"Eye-Witness." These paragraphs, it was said, were so interesting
and piquant that they were soon taken. This alone showed the young
man's practical and intellectual superiority over the masses of
needy and unfortunate students of both sexes who hang about the
offices of the newspapers and journals, unable to think of anything
better than everlasting entreaties for copying and translations
from the French. Having once got into touch with the editors Ivan
Fyodorovitch always kept up his connection with them, and in his
latter years at the university he published brilliant reviews of
books upon various special subjects, so that he became well known
in literary circles. But only in his last year he suddenly
succeeded in attracting the attention of a far wider circle of
readers, so that a great many people noticed and remembered him. It
was rather a curious incident. When he had just left the university
and was preparing to go abroad upon his two thousand roubles, Ivan
Fyodorovitch published in one of the more important journals a
strange article, which attracted general notice, on a subject of
which he might have been supposed to know nothing, as he was a
student of natural science. The article dealt with a subject which
was being debated everywhere at the time—the position of the
ecclesiastical courts. After discussing several opinions on the
subject he went on to explain his own view. What was most striking
about the article was its tone, and its unexpected conclusion. Many
of the Church party regarded him unquestioningly as on their side.
And yet not only the secularists but even atheists joined them in
their applause. Finally some sagacious persons opined that the
article was nothing but an impudent satirical burlesque. I mention
this incident particularly because this article penetrated into the
famous monastery in our neighborhood, where the inmates, being
particularly interested in the question of the ecclesiastical
courts, were completely bewildered by it. Learning the author's
name, they were interested in his being a native of the town and
the son of "that Fyodor Pavlovitch." And just then it was that the
author himself made his appearance among us.Why Ivan Fyodorovitch had come amongst us I remember asking
myself at the time with a certain uneasiness. This fateful visit,
which was the first step leading to so many consequences, I never
fully explained to myself. It seemed strange on the face of it that
a young man so learned, so proud, and apparently so cautious,
should suddenly visit such an infamous house and a father who had
ignored him all his life, hardly knew him, never thought of him,
and would not under any circumstances have given him money, though
he was always afraid that his sons Ivan and Alexey would also come
to ask him for it. And here the young man was staying in the house
of such a father, had been living with him for two months, and they
were on the best possible terms. This last fact was a special cause
of wonder to many others as well as to me. Pyotr Alexandrovitch
Miüsov, of whom we have spoken already, the cousin of Fyodor
Pavlovitch's first wife, happened to be in the neighborhood again
on a visit to his estate. He had come from Paris, which was his
permanent home. I remember that he was more surprised than any one
when he made the acquaintance of the young man, who interested him
extremely, and with whom he sometimes argued and not without an
inner pang compared himself in acquirements."He is proud," he used to say, "he will never be in want of
pence; he has got money enough to go abroad now. What does he want
here? Every one can see that he hasn't come for money, for his
father would never give him any. He has no taste for drink and
dissipation, and yet his father can't do without him. They get on
so well together!"That was the truth; the young man had an unmistakable
influence over his father, who positively appeared to be behaving
more decently and even seemed at times ready to obey his son,
though often extremely and even spitefully perverse.It was only later that we learned that Ivan had come partly
at the request of, and in the interests of, his elder brother,
Dmitri, whom he saw for the first time on this very visit, though
he had before leaving Moscow been in correspondence with him about
an important matter of more concern to Dmitri than himself. What
that business was the reader will learn fully in due time. Yet even
when I did know of this special circumstance I still felt Ivan
Fyodorovitch to be an enigmatic figure, and thought his visit
rather mysterious.I may add that Ivan appeared at the time in the light of a
mediator between his father and his elder brother Dmitri, who was
in open quarrel with his father and even planning to bring an
action against him.The family, I repeat, was now united for the first time, and
some of its members met for the first time in their lives. The
younger brother, Alexey, had been a year already among us, having
been the first of the three to arrive. It is of that brother Alexey
I find it most difficult to speak in this introduction. Yet I must
give some preliminary account of him, if only to explain one queer
fact, which is that I have to introduce my hero to the reader
wearing the cassock of a novice. Yes, he had been for the last year
in our monastery, and seemed willing to be cloistered there for the
rest of his life.
CHAPTER 4: THE THIRD SON, ALYOSHA
He was only twenty, his brother Ivan was in his twenty-fourth
year at the time, while their elder brother Dmitri was
twenty-seven. First of all, I must explain that this young man,
Alyosha, was not a fanatic, and, in my opinion at least, was not
even a mystic. I may as well give my full opinion from the
beginning. He was simply an early lover of humanity, and that he
adopted the monastic life was simply because at that time it struck
him, so to say, as the ideal escape for his soul struggling from
the darkness of worldly wickedness to the light of love. And the
reason this life struck him in this way was that he found in it at
that time, as he thought, an extraordinary being, our celebrated
elder, Zossima, to whom he became attached with all the warm first
love of his ardent heart. But I do not dispute that he was very
strange even at that time, and had been so indeed from his cradle.
I have mentioned already, by the way, that though he lost his
mother in his fourth year he remembered her all his life—her face,
her caresses, "as though she stood living before me." Such memories
may persist, as every one knows, from an even earlier age, even
from two years old, but scarcely standing out through a whole
lifetime like spots of light out of darkness, like a corner torn
out of a huge picture, which has all faded and disappeared except
that fragment. That is how it was with him. He remembered one still
summer evening, an open window, the slanting rays of the setting
sun (that he recalled most vividly of all); in a corner of the room
the holy image, before it a lighted lamp, and on her knees before
the image his mother, sobbing hysterically with cries and moans,
snatching him up in both arms, squeezing him close till it hurt,
and praying for him to the Mother of God, holding him out in both
arms to the image as though to put him under the Mother's
protection ... and suddenly a nurse runs in and snatches him from
her in terror. That was the picture! And Alyosha remembered his
mother's face at that minute. He used to say that it was frenzied
but beautiful as he remembered. But he rarely cared to speak of
this memory to any one. In his childhood and youth he was by no
means expansive, and talked little indeed, but not from shyness or
a sullen unsociability; quite the contrary, from something
different, from a sort of inner preoccupation entirely personal and
unconcerned with other people, but so important to him that he
seemed, as it were, to forget others on account of it. But he was
fond of people: he seemed throughout his life to put implicit trust
in people: yet no one ever looked on him as a simpleton or naïve
person. There was something about him which made one feel at once
(and it was so all his life afterwards) that he did not care to be
a judge of others—that he would never take it upon himself to
criticize and would never condemn any one for anything. He seemed,
indeed, to accept everything without the least condemnation though
often grieving bitterly: and this was so much so that no one could
surprise or frighten him even in his earliest youth. Coming at
twenty to his father's house, which was a very sink of filthy
debauchery, he, chaste and pure as he was, simply withdrew in
silence when to look on was unbearable, but without the slightest
sign of contempt or condemnation. His father, who had once been in
a dependent position, and so was sensitive and ready to take
offense, met him at first with distrust and sullenness. "He does
not say much," he used to say, "and thinks the more." But soon,
within a fortnight indeed, he took to embracing him and kissing him
terribly often, with drunken tears, with sottish sentimentality,
yet he evidently felt a real and deep affection for him, such as he
had never been capable of feeling for any one before.Every one, indeed, loved this young man wherever he went, and
it was so from his earliest childhood. When he entered the
household of his patron and benefactor, Yefim Petrovitch Polenov,
he gained the hearts of all the family, so that they looked on him
quite as their own child. Yet he entered the house at such a tender
age that he could not have acted from design nor artfulness in
winning affection. So that the gift of making himself loved
directly and unconsciously was inherent in him, in his very nature,
so to speak. It was the same at school, though he seemed to be just
one of those children who are distrusted, sometimes ridiculed, and
even disliked by their schoolfellows. He was dreamy, for instance,
and rather solitary. From his earliest childhood he was fond of
creeping into a corner to read, and yet he was a general favorite
all the while he was at school. He was rarely playful or merry, but
any one could see at the first glance that this was not from any
sullenness. On the contrary he was bright and good-tempered. He
never tried to show off among his schoolfellows. Perhaps because of
this, he was never afraid of any one, yet the boys immediately
understood that he was not proud of his fearlessness and seemed to
be unaware that he was bold and courageous. He never resented an
insult. It would happen that an hour after the offense he would
address the offender or answer some question with as trustful and
candid an expression as though nothing had happened between them.
And it was not that he seemed to have forgotten or intentionally
forgiven the affront, but simply that he did not regard it as an
affront, and this completely conquered and captivated the boys. He
had one characteristic which made all his schoolfellows from the
bottom class to the top want to mock at him, not from malice but
because it amused them. This characteristic was a wild fanatical
modesty and chastity. He could not bear to hear certain words and
certain conversations about women. There are "certain" words and
conversations unhappily impossible to eradicate in schools. Boys
pure in mind and heart, almost children, are fond of talking in
school among themselves, and even aloud, of things, pictures, and
images of which even soldiers would sometimes hesitate to speak.
More than that, much that soldiers have no knowledge or conception
of is familiar to quite young children of our intellectual and
higher classes. There is no moral depravity, no real corrupt inner
cynicism in it, but there is the appearance of it, and it is often
looked upon among them as something refined, subtle, daring, and
worthy of imitation. Seeing that Alyosha Karamazov put his fingers
in his ears when they talked of "that," they used sometimes to
crowd round him, pull his hands away, and shout nastiness into both
ears, while he struggled, slipped to the floor, tried to hide
himself without uttering one word of abuse, enduring their insults
in silence. But at last they left him alone and gave up taunting
him with being a "regular girl," and what's more they looked upon
it with compassion as a weakness. He was always one of the best in
the class but was never first.At the time of Yefim Petrovitch's death Alyosha had two more
years to complete at the provincial gymnasium. The inconsolable
widow went almost immediately after his death for a long visit to
Italy with her whole family, which consisted only of women and
girls. Alyosha went to live in the house of two distant relations
of Yefim Petrovitch, ladies whom he had never seen before. On what
terms he lived with them he did not know himself. It was very
characteristic of him, indeed, that he never cared at whose expense
he was living. In that respect he was a striking contrast to his
elder brother Ivan, who struggled with poverty for his first two
years in the university, maintained himself by his own efforts, and
had from childhood been bitterly conscious of living at the expense
of his benefactor. But this strange trait in Alyosha's character
must not, I think, be criticized too severely, for at the slightest
acquaintance with him any one would have perceived that Alyosha was
one of those youths, almost of the type of religious enthusiast,
who, if they were suddenly to come into possession of a large
fortune, would not hesitate to give it away for the asking, either
for good works or perhaps to a clever rogue. In general he seemed
scarcely to know the value of money, not, of course, in a literal
sense. When he was given pocket-money, which he never asked for, he
was either terribly careless of it so that it was gone in a moment,
or he kept it for weeks together, not knowing what to do with
it.In later years Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miüsov, a man very
sensitive on the score of money and bourgeois honesty, pronounced
the following judgment, after getting to know Alyosha:"Here is perhaps the one man in the world whom you might
leave alone without a penny, in the center of an unknown town of a
million inhabitants, and he would not come to harm, he would not
die of cold and hunger, for he would be fed and sheltered at once;
and if he were not, he would find a shelter for himself, and it
would cost him no effort or humiliation. And to shelter him would
be no burden, but, on the contrary, would probably be looked on as
a pleasure."He did not finish his studies at the gymnasium. A year before
the end of the course he suddenly announced to the ladies that he
was going to see his father about a plan which had occurred to him.
They were sorry and unwilling to let him go. The journey was not an
expensive one, and the ladies would not let him pawn his watch, a
parting present from his benefactor's family. They provided him
liberally with money and even fitted him out with new clothes and
linen. But he returned half the money they gave him, saying that he
intended to go third class. On his arrival in the town he made no
answer to his father's first inquiry why he had come before
completing his studies, and seemed, so they say, unusually
thoughtful. It soon became apparent that he was looking for his
mother's tomb. He practically acknowledged at the time that that
was the only object of his visit. But it can hardly have been the
whole reason of it. It is more probable that he himself did not
understand and could not explain what had suddenly arisen in his
soul, and drawn him irresistibly into a new, unknown, but
inevitable path. Fyodor Pavlovitch could not show him where his
second wife was buried, for he had never visited her grave since he
had thrown earth upon her coffin, and in the course of years had
entirely forgotten where she was buried.Fyodor Pavlovitch, by the way, had for some time previously
not been living in our town. Three or four years after his wife's
death he had gone to the south of Russia and finally turned up in
Odessa, where he spent several years. He made the acquaintance at
first, in his own words, "of a lot of low Jews, Jewesses, and
Jewkins," and ended by being received by "Jews high and low alike."
It may be presumed that at this period he developed a peculiar
faculty for making and hoarding money. He finally returned to our
town only three years before Alyosha's arrival. His former
acquaintances found him looking terribly aged, although he was by
no means an old man. He behaved not exactly with more dignity but
with more effrontery. The former buffoon showed an insolent
propensity for making buffoons of others. His depravity with women
was not simply what it used to be, but even more revolting. In a
short time he opened a great number of new taverns in the district.
It was evident that he had perhaps a hundred thousand roubles or
not much less. Many of the inhabitants of the town and district
were soon in his debt, and, of course, had given good security. Of
late, too, he looked somehow bloated and seemed more irresponsible,
more uneven, had sunk into a sort of incoherence, used to begin one
thing and go on with another, as though he were letting himself go
altogether. He was more and more frequently drunk. And, if it had
not been for the same servant Grigory, who by that time had aged
considerably too, and used to look after him sometimes almost like
a tutor, Fyodor Pavlovitch might have got into terrible scrapes.
Alyosha's arrival seemed to affect even his moral side, as though
something had awakened in this prematurely old man which had long
been dead in his soul."Do you know," he used often to say, looking at Alyosha,
"that you are like her, 'the crazy woman' "—that was what he used
to call his dead wife, Alyosha's mother. Grigory it was who pointed
out the "crazy woman's" grave to Alyosha. He took him to our town
cemetery and showed him in a remote corner a cast-iron tombstone,
cheap but decently kept, on which were inscribed the name and age
of the deceased and the date of her death, and below a four-lined
verse, such as are commonly used on old-fashioned middle-class
tombs. To Alyosha's amazement this tomb turned out to be Grigory's
doing. He had put it up on the poor "crazy woman's" grave at his
own expense, after Fyodor Pavlovitch, whom he had often pestered
about the grave, had gone to Odessa, abandoning the grave and all
his memories. Alyosha showed no particular emotion at the sight of
his mother's grave. He only listened to Grigory's minute and solemn
account of the erection of the tomb; he stood with bowed head and
walked away without uttering a word. It was perhaps a year before
he visited the cemetery again. But this little episode was not
without an influence upon Fyodor Pavlovitch—and a very original
one. He suddenly took a thousand roubles to our monastery to pay
for requiems for the soul of his wife; but not for the second,
Alyosha's mother, the "crazy woman," but for the first, Adelaïda
Ivanovna, who used to thrash him. In the evening of the same day he
got drunk and abused the monks to Alyosha. He himself was far from
being religious; he had probably never put a penny candle before
the image of a saint. Strange impulses of sudden feeling and sudden
thought are common in such types.I have mentioned already that he looked bloated. His
countenance at this time bore traces of something that testified
unmistakably to the life he had led. Besides the long fleshy bags
under his little, always insolent, suspicious, and ironical eyes;
besides the multitude of deep wrinkles in his little fat face, the
Adam's apple hung below his sharp chin like a great, fleshy goiter,
which gave him a peculiar, repulsive, sensual appearance; add to
that a long rapacious mouth with full lips, between which could be
seen little stumps of black decayed teeth. He slobbered every time
he began to speak. He was fond indeed of making fun of his own
face, though, I believe, he was well satisfied with it. He used
particularly to point to his nose, which was not very large, but
very delicate and conspicuously aquiline. "A regular Roman nose,"
he used to say, "with my goiter I've quite the countenance of an
ancient Roman patrician of the decadent period." He seemed proud of
it.Not long after visiting his mother's grave Alyosha suddenly
announced that he wanted to enter the monastery, and that the monks
were willing to receive him as a novice. He explained that this was
his strong desire, and that he was solemnly asking his consent as
his father. The old man knew that the elder Zossima, who was living
in the monastery hermitage, had made a special impression upon his
"gentle boy.""That is the most honest monk among them, of course," he
observed, after listening in thoughtful silence to Alyosha, and
seeming scarcely surprised at his request. "H'm!... So that's where
you want to be, my gentle boy?"He was half drunk, and suddenly he grinned his slow
half-drunken grin, which was not without a certain cunning and
tipsy slyness. "H'm!... I had a presentiment that you would end in
something like this. Would you believe it? You were making straight
for it. Well, to be sure you have your own two thousand. That's a
dowry for you. And I'll never desert you, my angel. And I'll pay
what's wanted for you there, if they ask for it. But, of course, if
they don't ask, why should we worry them? What do you say? You
know, you spend money like a canary, two grains a week. H'm!... Do
you know that near one monastery there's a place outside the town
where every baby knows there are none but 'the monks' wives'
living, as they are called. Thirty women, I believe. I have been
there myself. You know, it's interesting in its own way, of course,
as a variety. The worst of it is it's awfully Russian. There are no
French women there. Of course they could get them fast enough, they
have plenty of money. If they get to hear of it they'll come along.
Well, there's nothing of that sort here, no 'monks' wives,' and two
hundred monks. They're honest. They keep the fasts. I admit it....
H'm.... So you want to be a monk? And do you know I'm sorry to lose
you, Alyosha; would you believe it, I've really grown fond of you?
Well, it's a good opportunity. You'll pray for us sinners; we have
sinned too much here. I've always been thinking who would pray for
me, and whether there's any one in the world to do it. My dear boy,
I'm awfully stupid about that. You wouldn't believe it. Awfully.
You see, however stupid I am about it, I keep thinking, I keep
thinking—from time to time, of course, not all the while. It's
impossible, I think, for the devils to forget to drag me down to
hell with their hooks when I die. Then I wonder—hooks? Where would
they get them? What of? Iron hooks? Where do they forge them? Have
they a foundry there of some sort? The monks in the monastery
probably believe that there's a ceiling in hell, for instance. Now
I'm ready to believe in hell, but without a ceiling. It makes it
more refined, more enlightened, more Lutheran that is. And, after
all, what does it matter whether it has a ceiling or hasn't? But,
do you know, there's a damnable question involved in it? If there's
no ceiling there can be no hooks, and if there are no hooks it all
breaks down, which is unlikely again, for then there would be none
to drag me down to hell, and if they don't drag me down what
justice is there in the world?Il faudrait les
inventer, those hooks, on purpose for me alone,
for, if you only knew, Alyosha, what a blackguard I
am.""But there are no hooks there," said Alyosha, looking gently
and seriously at his father."Yes, yes, only the shadows of hooks, I know, I know. That's
how a Frenchman described hell:'J'ai bu l'ombre
d'un cocher qui avec l'ombre d'une brosse frottait l'ombre d'une
carrosse.'How do you know there are no hooks,
darling? When you've lived with the monks you'll sing a different
tune. But go and get at the truth there, and then come and tell me.
Anyway it's easier going to the other world if one knows what there
is there. Besides, it will be more seemly for you with the monks
than here with me, with a drunken old man and young harlots ...
though you're like an angel, nothing touches you. And I dare say
nothing will touch you there. That's why I let you go, because I
hope for that. You've got all your wits about you. You will burn
and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again. And
I will wait for you. I feel that you're the only creature in the
world who has not condemned me. My dear boy, I feel it, you know. I
can't help feeling it."And he even began blubbering. He was sentimental. He was
wicked and sentimental.
CHAPTER 5: ELDERS
Some of my readers may imagine that my young man was a
sickly, ecstatic, poorly developed creature, a pale, consumptive
dreamer. On the contrary, Alyosha was at this time a well-grown,
red-cheeked, clear-eyed lad of nineteen, radiant with health. He
was very handsome, too, graceful, moderately tall, with hair of a
dark brown, with a regular, rather long, oval-shaped face, and
wide-set dark gray, shining eyes; he was very thoughtful, and
apparently very serene. I shall be told, perhaps, that red cheeks
are not incompatible with fanaticism and mysticism; but I fancy
that Alyosha was more of a realist than any one. Oh! no doubt, in
the monastery he fully believed in miracles, but, to my thinking,
miracles are never a stumbling-block to the realist. It is not
miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, if
he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to
disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a
miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own
senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a
fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does not, in
the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If
the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to
admit the miraculous also. The Apostle Thomas said that he would
not believe till he saw, but when he did see he said, "My Lord and
my God!" Was it the miracle forced him to believe? Most likely not,
but he believed solely because he desired to believe and possibly
he fully believed in his secret heart even when he said, "I do not
believe till I see."I shall be told, perhaps, that Alyosha was stupid,
undeveloped, had not finished his studies, and so on. That he did
not finish his studies is true, but to say that he was stupid or
dull would be a great injustice. I'll simply repeat what I have
said above. He entered upon this path only because, at that time,
it alone struck his imagination and presented itself to him as
offering an ideal means of escape for his soul from darkness to
light. Add to that that he was to some extent a youth of our last
epoch—that is, honest in nature, desiring the truth, seeking for it
and believing in it, and seeking to serve it at once with all the
strength of his soul, seeking for immediate action, and ready to
sacrifice everything, life itself, for it. Though these young men
unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many
cases, the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for
instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and
tedious study, if only to multiply tenfold their powers of serving
the truth and the cause they have set before them as their
goal—such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of
them. The path Alyosha chose was a path going in the opposite
direction, but he chose it with the same thirst for swift
achievement. As soon as he reflected seriously he was convinced of
the existence of God and immortality, and at once he instinctively
said to himself: "I want to live for immortality, and I will accept
no compromise." In the same way, if he had decided that God and
immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist
and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labor question, it
is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the
form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel
built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up
heaven on earth. Alyosha would have found it strange and impossible
to go on living as before. It is written: "Give all that thou hast
to the poor and follow Me, if thou wouldst be
perfect."Alyosha said to himself: "I can't give two roubles instead of
'all,' and only go to mass instead of 'following Him.' " Perhaps
his memories of childhood brought back our monastery, to which his
mother may have taken him to mass. Perhaps the slanting sunlight
and the holy image to which his poor "crazy" mother had held him up
still acted upon his imagination. Brooding on these things he may
have come to us perhaps only to see whether here he could sacrifice
all or only "two roubles," and in the monastery he met this elder.
I must digress to explain what an "elder" is in Russian
monasteries, and I am sorry that I do not feel very competent to do
so. I will try, however, to give a superficial account of it in a
few words. Authorities on the subject assert that the institution
of "elders" is of recent date, not more than a hundred years old in
our monasteries, though in the orthodox East, especially in Sinai
and Athos, it has existed over a thousand years. It is maintained
that it existed in ancient times in Russia also, but through the
calamities which overtook Russia—the Tartars, civil war, the
interruption of relations with the East after the destruction of
Constantinople—this institution fell into oblivion. It was revived
among us towards the end of last century by one of the great
"ascetics," as they called him, Païssy Velitchkovsky, and his
disciples. But to this day it exists in few monasteries only, and
has sometimes been almost persecuted as an innovation in Russia. It
flourished especially in the celebrated Kozelski Optin Monastery.
When and how it was introduced into our monastery I cannot say.
There had already been three such elders and Zossima was the last
of them. But he was almost dying of weakness and disease, and they
had no one to take his place. The question for our monastery was an
important one, for it had not been distinguished by anything in
particular till then: they had neither relics of saints, nor
wonder-working ikons, nor glorious traditions, nor historical
exploits. It had flourished and been glorious all over Russia
through its elders, to see and hear whom pilgrims had flocked for
thousands of miles from all parts.What was such an elder? An elder was one who took your soul,
your will, into his soul and his will. When you choose an elder,
you renounce your own will and yield it to him in complete
submission, complete self-abnegation. This novitiate, this terrible
school of abnegation, is undertaken voluntarily, in the hope of
self-conquest, of self-mastery, in order, after a life of
obedience, to attain perfect freedom, that is, from self; to escape
the lot of those who have lived their whole life without finding
their true selves in themselves. This institution of elders is not
founded on theory, but was established in the East from the
practice of a thousand years. The obligations due to an elder are
not the ordinary "obedience" which has always existed in our
Russian monasteries. The obligation involves confession to the
elder by all who have submitted themselves to him, and to the
indissoluble bond between him and them.