The Brothers Karamazov (5 page)

“You know what?” he would often say, examining Alyosha’s face closely. “You’re just like her, just like the Crazy Woman.” That was his way of referring to Alyosha’s mother, his late second wife.

It was Gregory who finally showed Alyosha where the “Crazy Woman” was buried. He took Alyosha to a far corner of our cemetery where he pointed out a cheap but decently kept grave with an iron headstone bearing the name of the deceased, the dates of her birth and death, and even an ancient four-line verse such as is often found on the tombs of lower middle-class folk. Strange as it may seem, the gravestone turned out to be Gregory’s doing. He had it placed on the poor “Crazy Woman’s” grave at his own expense after Mr. Karamazov, whom he had repeatedly plagued about it, finally left for Odessa without doing anything, turning his back not only on his wife’s grave but on all his memories as well.

Alyosha showed no particular emotion at the sight of his mother’s grave. After listening attentively to Gregory’s dignified and precise account of the erection of the gravestone, he stood there for a while, his head bowed, then walked away without a word. And it was perhaps a whole year before he visited the grave again.

But when Mr. Karamazov heard about the episode, his reaction was quite unexpected: he all of a sudden donated a thousand rubles to our monastery for requiem masses to be said for the soul of his wife, not for his second wife, though, not for Alyosha’s mother, the poor “Crazy Woman,” but for his first wife Adelaida, the one who used to beat him. Then, later that night, he got drunk and started abusing the monks to Alyosha. Mr. Karamazov had never been a religious man and it may be that until then he had never even placed a five-kopek candle before an icon. But then such characters are sometimes swept up in some unexpected idea or impulse.

As I mentioned earlier, Karamazov’s face had grown bloated and showed unmistakable traces of the life he led. Besides the heavy, fleshy bags under his eternally insolent, suspicious, mocking little eyes, besides the multitude of tiny wrinkles on his small flabby face, his large, meaty Adam’s apple hung under his sharp chin shaped like a purse, and this somehow gave him a repulsively sensual air. Add to this a long, carnivorous mouth with puffy lips and the black stumps of almost completely decayed teeth, from which saliva sprayed every time he opened his mouth to speak. He often made fun of his appearance himself, although, on the whole, he seemed quite satisfied with it. He particularly liked to point to his nose which, though not very long, was remarkably narrow and beaked. “It is a genuine Roman nose,” he would say, “and, with my Adam’s apple, it makes me look like a Roman patrician of the decadent period.” He seemed very proud of this.

Shortly after he had been shown his mother’s grave, Alyosha suddenly announced to his father that he wanted to enter the monastery and that the monks were willing to accept him as a novice. He explained that this was his fervent desire and that he was asking for paternal consent. Mr. Karamazov was already aware of the impression made by the elder, Zosima, who was living in the monastery’s hermitage, on his “gentle boy.”

“Old Zosima is certainly the most honest among the monks,” he said, after listening to Alyosha’s request in thoughtful silence. He seemed hardly surprised. “Hm . . . so that’s what you want, my gentle boy!” He had been drinking and suddenly his face dissolved into a wide, half-drunken smile, in which there was a spark of besotted cunning. “Hm . . . you may not believe it, but I’ve had a feeling for a long time that you’d come up with something like this in the end. Well, if that’s what you want, I have no objections. You have those two thousand rubles of your own, for dowry if you need it, and, for my part, you can be sure I’ll never let you down. I’ll even pay for your admission if they ask for it. Of course, if they don’t ask for it, there’s no reason for us to force it on them, is there? Why, you’re no more expensive to keep than a canary—two grains a week—that’s all you need . . . Hm-hm . . . now let me tell you that I know of a monastery with a nice little settlement nearby inhabited only by women, the monastery wives—that’s what the people of the district call them, for everyone knows about it. I’d say there are thirty of those ‘wives’ in the settlement. I’ve been there, and it was very interesting—in its own way, of course, just as a change. It’s a bit spoilt by Russian nationalism, though: there’s still not a single Frenchwoman there, although they could easily afford some—it’s a very prosperous monastery indeed. But French girls will soon hear of it and they’ll come of their own accord. But there’s nothing like that in our monastery—no monastery wives although there are two hundred monks. It’s all honest. They keep their fasts. Well, I must say . . . hm . . . So you want to be a monk? I’m certainly sorry you want to leave, Alyosha—it’s surprising how attached to you I’ve become . . . It will have one advantage, though: you can pray for us sinners, for we may have gone too far in our sinning. Yes, sir, I’ve wondered for a long time whether anyone would ever pray for me, whether there was a man in the world who would want to. Ah, my dear boy, you wouldn’t believe how stupid I am on that point. Awfully stupid. But stupid as I am about these things, I do think of them now and then—for you wouldn’t expect me to think of them all the time, would you? Well then, sometimes I reason like this: ‘As soon as I die, the devils are sure to drag me down to their place with their hooks.’ But then I think: ‘What hooks? What are they made of? Are they iron hooks? If so, where were they forged? Do they have some kind of ironworks down there, or what?’ Why, I’m sure the monks in the monastery take it for granted that hell has, for instance, a ceiling. But it would be easier for me to imagine a hell without a ceiling—that would be more refined, more enlightened, more Lutheran, that is. And what difference does it make whether hell has a ceiling or not? Oh no, it damn well makes all the difference in the world, because if there’s no ceiling, there aren’t any hooks either, and if there aren’t any hooks, then the whole idea goes to pieces. And that too is hard to believe because, if they’re not going to drag me down to hell, what justice is there in the world? No, even if they didn’t exist, those hooks, 
il faudrait les inventer,
 even especially for me, because you can’t even begin to imagine, my boy, all the disgraceful things I’ve done.”

“But there are no hooks there,” Alyosha said quietly and seriously, looking attentively at his father.

“I know, I know, just the shadows of hooks. I’ve heard the story. It’s like that Frenchman’s description of hell: 
‘J’ai vu I’ombre d’un cocher, qui avec I’ombre d’une brosse frottait I’ombre d’une carrosse.’
 And how do you know, my dear boy, that there are no hooks? We’ll see what tune you sing after you’ve spent a while with those monks. Still, while you’re there, try to find out the truth, and when you do, come and tell me what’s what. It will be easier to leave for the other world if I know what to expect there. Besides, it will be more seemly for you to live in the monastery than to stay here with an old drunkard like me, and with all these sluts, though nothing could sully you, clean angel that you are. Well, I trust there’ll be nothing to sully you there either and that’s why I’m letting you go. Why, devils haven’t eaten your brains, after all, and if you’re all afire to go there now, it’ll burn off in good time, cool off. You’ll get over it and come back to me. And I’ll be waiting for you here, because I know you’re the only person on earth who hasn’t condemned me—I feel it. I can’t help feeling it!”

And he even wept. He was sentimental. He was wicked and sentimental.

Chapter 5: Elders

THE READER may imagine, perhaps, that my young man was sickly, exalted, a poor physical specimen, an undersized, puny, pale, and consumptive dreamer. Just the opposite was true: Alyosha was then the picture of health, a sturdy, red-cheeked, clear-eyed nineteen-year-old boy. He was very handsome, too, and slender, above average height, with dark-brown hair, a regular although rather long face, and shiny dark-gray wide-set eyes, which gave him a thoughtful and serene look. Of course, nothing prevents a mystic or a fanatic from having red cheeks. But be that as it may, I think Alyosha was more of a realist than anyone I know. Of course, when he was in the monastery he believed entirely in miracles, but I don’t think that miracles ever confound a realist. Nor is it miracles that bring a realist to religion. If he is an unbeliever, a true realist will always find the strength and ability not to believe in a miracle, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact, he will rather disbelieve his own senses than accept that fact. Or he may concede the fact and explain it away as a natural phenomenon until then unknown. In a realist, it is not miracles that generate faith, but faith that generates miracles. Once a realist becomes a believer, however, his very realism will make him accept the existence of miracles. The apostle Thomas said he would not believe until he saw, and when he saw, he said: “My Lord and my God!” Was it a miracle that made him believe? Most likely not. He believed only because he wanted to believe, and possibly he already believed in the secret recesses of his being while he was saying, “Except I shall see, I will not believe.”

Some may say that Alyosha was not too bright, rather uneducated, had not even finished school, and so on. It is true that he had not finished school, but it would be doing him a great injustice to say that he was obtuse or stupid. I shall simply repeat here what I have said before: he chose the course he did only because it struck him at that particular moment as the ideal course for his soul, which longed to escape from darkness into light. It must be added that, in a way, he was indeed a member of our younger generation, which means that he was honest, that he believed in, demanded, and searched for truth; that, because he believed in it, he yearned to serve it and give it his whole strength; he was spoiling for immediate action, was prepared to sacrifice everything, his life itself, in an act of supreme devotion. Unfortunately, these young men often fail to understand that the sacrifice of their lives may be the easiest of all sacrifices, much easier, for instance, than giving up five or six years of their seething youth to hard study, to the acquisition of knowledge which would increase their strength tenfold in the service of that same cause, and in the performance of the great works they aspire to. But to sacrifice those few years to study often proves too much for them. Alyosha chose a course opposite to that of the majority, although he felt the same yearning for action and sacrifice as the others. Once, having given it serious thought, he had become convinced of the existence of God and immortality, it was natural for him to say to himself: “I want to live to achieve immortality and will accept no compromise.” If by chance he had become convinced that God and immortality did not exist, he would immediately have joined the ranks of the atheists and socialists (for socialism is not just a question of labor organization; it is above all an atheistic phenomenon, the modern manifestation of atheism, one more tower of Babel built without God, not in order to reach out toward heaven from earth, but to bring heaven down to earth). Once he had decided, Alyosha would have félt it strange, even impossible, to go on living as he had been.

It is written: “If thou wouldst be perfect, go and give up all that thou hast and come and follow me.” So Alyosha said to himself: “I cannot very well just give up a couple of rubles, instead of all that I have, or, instead of obeying the Lord’s ‘Follow me,’ just attend church.” Perhaps there lingered in his mind some early memory of our monastery, to which his mother may have taken him to attend mass. Or perhaps his decision was somehow connected with the slanting rays of the setting sun on the icon before which his crazy mother had held him. When he first arrived, Alyosha had seemed to be pondering deeply about something, perhaps trying to decide whether he would be able to give up “all” or only a couple of rubles. Then he met the elder at the monastery.

This was the elder Zosima whom I mentioned earlier. But before I proceed, I should try to explain what an “elder” in our monasteries is. I regret that I am not fully versed in these matters, but I will do my best to give a rough idea of that institution. First of all, according to the experts, the institution of elder came into existence in our Russian monasteries only quite recently, less than a hundred years ago, although it has existed for well over a thousand years throughout the Orthodox East, particularly in Sinai and on Mount Athos. As I understand it, in olden times there were probably elders in Russia too, but as the country went through a series of calamities—the Tartar invasion, civil wars, and isolation from the Orthodox East after the fall of Constantinople—the institution fell into disuse and the elders vanished from our monasteries. They were reintroduced in Russia toward the end of the eighteenth century by the great ascetic (as he was called) Paisii Velichkovsky and his followers, but to this day, almost a hundred years later, elders are found in only a very few monasteries and they have occasionally been subjected to persecution as an un-Russian innovation. The institution of elder especially flourished in the famous Kozelskaya Optina Monastery. Who introduced it into our monastery and when I cannot say. I only know that there had already been three elders, Zosima being the third. But he was weak and sick and obviously did not have long to live, and no one knew where another would be found to take his place. This was a crucial problem for our monastery because it had not previously been renowned for anything in particular: it had no saints’ relics, no miracle-working icons, nor even any glorious traditions connected with the history of Russia. Nor were there any records of special services it had rendered the country. It was only thanks to its elders that it had flourished and its fame spread all over Russia; it was to see and hear our elders that pilgrims from every corner of the country traveled thousands of miles to flock to the monastery.

What precisely is an elder, then? An elder is a man who takes your soul and your will into his soul and his will. Once you have chosen your elder, you renounce your own will, you yield it to him in total submission and self-renunciation. A man who consents to this ordeal, to this terrible apprenticeship, is willing to bear it in the hope that, after a long period of trial, he will conquer himself and achieve a self-mastery that will enable him to finally attain, through a whole life of obedience, complete freedom (that is, freedom from himself) and thus avoid the fate of those who reach the end of their lives without ever having found themselves within themselves.