Summary of the book
In a single day, Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov tries to do what the master left him to do, reconcile and unite, and at every door he knocks he wounds someone without meaning to. At the monastery he hears the doctrine that each is guilty before all, while the monks wait for a miracle, and Father Ferapont, the holy fool who sees devils, gains ground against the eldership. At his father's house he hears the philosophy of an old man without paradise. Before six schoolboys he is stoned for being a Karamazov and bitten by a boy he cannot explain. In Katerina Ivanovna's drawing room he says aloud what he saw, and provokes the rupture between her and Ivan. In Captain Snegiryov's hut he recognizes the boy, hands over the money from the fiancée of the man who humiliated the boy's father, and sees the banknotes trampled. What unites the scenes is refusal: each offended person (Ivan, Katerina, the captain, the boy) answers the help or love offered with a wounded dignity that prefers to lose everything rather than be bought. The question the book leaves is whether Alyosha's goodness, which loves actively and asks forgiveness before knowing what he has done, can reach those who defend themselves against compassion.
Chapter I: Father Ferapont
Chapter summary
Before dawn, the Elder Zosima wakes very weak but lucid and almost cheerful, and tells Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov that he may not live until the end of the day. He confesses to Father Paisius, takes communion, and receives the anointing. The cell fills with monks from the hermitage and the monastery, and he wants to bid farewell to each of them, kissing them one by one. He speaks and teaches as long as he has a voice, in a disjointed way, out of the habit of so many years and because, according to the narrator, he wants to share one last time the joy and say what was left unsaid. The first thing he tells them disarms the pride of those who live among those walls:
Analysis
Любите друг друга, отцы [...] Не святее же мы мирских за то, что сюда пришли и в сих стенах затворились, а, напротив, всякий сюда пришедший, уже тем самым, что пришел сюда, познал про себя, что он хуже всех мирских и всех и вся на земле
, Love one another, fathers [...] We are no holier than laymen merely because we have come here and shut ourselves within these walls. On the contrary, whoever has come here, simply by coming, has come to know in himself that he is worse than all the laymen and than everyone and everything on earth.
The master inverts the reason for the monastery before those around him: entering there confers no title of sanctity, it is a confession of being worse. He says this at the hour of parting, with the cell full of people waiting for something great after his death, and the lesson works both as a testament and as a brake on the pride of having a saint among them.
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Chapter II: Alyosha at His Father's House
Chapter summary
Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov goes first to his father, because the old man insisted the day before that he come, and because he wants to know what Fyodor intended to tell him in private. Marfa Ignatyevna, who opens the gate for him, warns that Grigory is in bed in the annex and that Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov left two hours ago. Smerdyakov went to buy lunch, so Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is alone in the house. He finds him in slippers, his face still marked by the fight with Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov the day before: his forehead bruised and tied in a red handkerchief, his nose swollen, and every moment going to the mirror. The old man receives him with hostility, says he called him over nothing, and soon pours out what he carries. He is fifty-five and wants to live another twenty years as a man, for when women stop coming willingly, and so he gathers money only for himself. He claims that one lives sweeter in filth, that everyone lives in it, only in secret, while he does so openly, and he answers in advance what Alyosha might say about the other world:
Analysis
Chapter III: The Boys and the Stones
Chapter summary
Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov leaves his father's house relieved that Fyodor did not ask about Grushenka, because then he would have had to tell of the meeting the day before. He heads to Madame Khokhlakova's house with the feeling that the combatants have regained their strength during the night and that hearts, the father's and Mitya's, have hardened again with the day. He resolves that he must find his brother at any cost. On the way, beside a little bridge over a ditch, he sees six schoolboys aged nine to twelve, all with stones in their hands, and on the other side of the ditch, by a fence, a boy of about nine, pale and sickly, with black flashing eyes and his coat pockets stuffed with stones. Alyosha can never pass children by with indifference. He approaches the group and begins with a practical remark about which side one of them carries his bag on, because he knows by instinct that an adult wins a gang of children only by treating them seriously and as equals. The boy is left-handed and is called Smurov, and a stone from across the ditch grazes him. Smurov throws one back, and the next stone, from the isolated boy, hits Alyosha:
Analysis
Chapter IV: At the Khokhlakovs'
Chapter summary
Madame Khokhlakova, owner of a two-story stone house in the center of town, rushes into the vestibule when she sees Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, eager to know whether he has already spread the "new miracle" of the elder, the son returned to his mother. She tells him that Katerina Ivanovna is in the next room with Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov, in a solemn conversation that she calls "nadryv," the laceration of the soul that displays itself and delights in itself. The two are ruining themselves without knowing what for; they know it, and they take pleasure in it. Alyosha replies that it was precisely to see Katerina Ivanovna that he came, since she summoned him the day before. The daughter of the house, Lise Khokhlakova, who heard him arrive and had a fit, speaks through a crack in the door. Her mother, lamenting the night of fever, the doctor Herzenstube, and the miracle, loses the thread.
Analysis
Chapter V: Nadryv in the Drawing Room
Chapter summary
In the drawing room, the conversation between Katerina Ivanovna and Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov is coming to an end, and Ivan was getting up to leave when Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov and the lady of the house come in. Alyosha comes in worried. For a month he has been hinted at that Ivan loves Katerina and wants to take her away from Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov. Mitya told him the day before that he is glad of his brother's rivalry, and he himself, after the scene with Grushenka, is no longer sure that Katerina loves Mitya. The word "nadryv," which Madame Khokhlakova has just said, made him shudder, because he murmured it in his sleep that very dawn. Alyosha loves both brothers and cannot bear uncertainty, because his love is always active: he loves, and at once sets about helping, and to help he needs to know what each one wants and deserves. He does not know even the first word of what is going on.
Seeing him, Katerina calls him closer and asks Ivan to stay one more minute: she wants Alyosha's opinion, since she trusts him with her whole being, in front of the two friends. She says that after yesterday's scene she does not even know whether she still loves Mitya, because she pities him, and that is a bad sign for love. She then states the decision reached that night, which Ivan, her counselor and only friend, approves: even if Mitya marries that "creature," she will never leave him.
Analysis
Chapter VI: The Captain's Hut
Chapter summary
Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov leaves Khokhlakova's house with a great and rare pain: he "has done a foolish thing," and in love, of all things, a matter he says he does not understand. The elder sent him to reconcile and unite, and he has just joined what he did not want to join. He resolves to be smarter next time and heads for Ozernaya Street, where the captain Katerina pointed out lives. On the way he passes Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov's lodgings, which lie on the route, and does not find him there. The carpenter who rents the room answers, with the air of someone who has been instructed, that he has not slept at home for three days, and he looks alarmed when Alyosha asks about Grushenka. Alyosha concludes that they like Mitya and protect him. It also occurs to him that the captain's son Katerina mentioned can only be the boy who bit him, and the idea distracts him from his remorse: he decides to do what he was asked and let the rest happen.
Analysis
Chapter VII: In the Open Air
Chapter summary
The captain leads Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov out into the street, wanting to explain the scene in the square that he could not tell indoors. A week earlier, Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov had pulled him out of the tavern by his little beard, "the scrubber," as the schoolboys already called him, and dragged him to the square at the hour the children were leaving school. Ilyusha, on seeing him, ran, embraced him, shouted to Mitya to let him go, and kissed his hand, begging pardon on his father's behalf. Alyosha swears the brother will apologize on his knees. The captain, after observing that the promise is still a plan and comes from Alyosha's generosity, not Mitya's, completes the story with the chivalry of the offender:
Analysis
Reading of the book
Analysis