The Brothers Karamazov
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 vu 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 V.
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