Summary of the book
In little more than a day, the novel brings face to face the two brothers who most avoided each other and, in the end, drives the eldest out of the father's house. Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov becomes engaged to Lise Khokhlakova and suddenly confesses that he may not believe in God. Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov opens up to him in a tavern: he loves life before logic, accepts God and rejects the world, returns his ticket of admission to a harmony paid for with a child's tears, and tells the poem in which an old cardinal arrests Christ so that He will not disturb the happiness the Church has manufactured, and receives a kiss in response. On his return, Ivan finds Smerdyakov at the gate, who explains to him, without asking for anything, the code of knocks agreed with the father, the envelope with the three thousand, and the reckoning of forty thousand for each son, and advises him to drop everything. Ivan leaves for Moscow the next morning, after telling the servant he would go to Chermashnya and asking a coachman to tell his father he has changed his mind. That same afternoon Smerdyakov falls into a fit in the cellar, Grigory falls ill, and Fyodor locks himself in with his hope. The question the book leaves is what separates the refusal Ivan formulates from the refusal he practices.
Chapter I: Lise's Engagement
Chapter summary
At Khokhlakova's, the hostess receives Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov in distress: Katerina Ivanovna had a nervous fit that ended in a faint and now raves with fever. The aunts have already arrived, the doctor Herzenstube has not. With no time to hear Alyosha's adventures, Madame Khokhlakova tells him to wait for Lise Khokhlakova, who, she whispers, has begun to regret seriously having laughed at him, and whom her heart forgives everything. Lise, embarrassed, talks quickly about nothing at all, until she asks about the two hundred rubles: her mother told her the story of the humiliated officer, and she cried listening. Alyosha tells what happened in the hut and in the street, and his portrait of the boy Ilyusha moves her so much that, when he reaches the trampled banknotes, Lise clasps her hands and reproaches him: why did he not run after him and catch up? Alyosha, who rises and walks about the room, answers that it was better not to run, and explains why: he is certain the captain did not know, until the last instant, that he would trample them.
Analysis
это ужасно как тяжело для обиженного человека, когда все на него станут смотреть его благодетелями
, it is terribly hard for an offended man when everyone begins to look at him as their benefactor.
Alyosha reads the captain from himself and from what he heard from the elder, and he tells Lise where he went wrong. The captain was already ashamed of having shown his joy in front of him and of having embraced him too soon, and Alyosha had added that they would give him more money and that he himself would give it. Two readings: a fine analysis of the shame of the one who receives, or the need for the failure of the mission to have a meaning, because Alyosha comes to Lise still wounded by the scene in the street.
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Chapter II: Smerdyakov and the Guitar
Chapter summary
Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov should run to the monastery, where the elder is dying, but an idea that came to him as he took his leave of Lise dominates him: to catch Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov by surprise, since his brother is hiding from him. A certainty of an imminent catastrophe grows in him by the hour, and he does not know precisely what he wants to say to Mitya. He prefers that the benefactor die without him rather than spend his whole life accusing himself of having passed by when he might have saved something. So he again jumps the fence of the garden next to Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov's, and hides in the same little summer house, without warning anyone, because the neighbor and Foma might be loyal to his brother and warn Mitya that they are looking for him. Fifteen minutes pass, and he hears guitar chords and a falsetto voice, the tenor of a lackey, singing a song. In the bushes, on a greenish bench, sit Smerdyakov, in his festive clothes, pomaded, in varnished boots, and Maria Kondratyevna, the daughter of the house, in a blue dress with a two-archin train, who has come from Moscow and goes to the kitchen to fetch soup. She courts him, and he, upright, answers with cold dignity. When she asks him to continue the song, which she so admires, he disparages the verse:
Analysis
Chapter III: The Brothers Meet
Chapter summary
Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov is not in a private room but in a corner of the tavern's front room, by the window, hidden behind a screen, and he has already finished dinner. He is glad to have caught Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov. He orders fish soup, tea, and cherry jam, which Alyosha loved as a child at the Polenovs' house, and says he remembers him from when he was eleven. Between fifteen and eleven there is too great a gap for brothers to be companions. He does not know whether he loved him, and in four months in town the two have not exchanged a word. He leaves tomorrow and wanted to see him first, to get to know him and to make himself known once and for all, because it seems to him that the best moment to know someone is before a separation. For three months he saw Alyosha's look of expectation, which he could not bear, and so he did not approach. But in the end he respected the firm young man and, finally, came to like that look. Alyosha replies that Dmitri says Ivan is a tomb, and that he himself saw him as an enigma, but that since this morning he has understood one thing: Ivan is a twenty-three-year-old like the rest, young, good, a greenhorn. Ivan, astonished, says he has thought of nothing else since the scene at Katerina's house, and sets about speaking of what sustains him:
Analysis
Chapter IV: Rebellion
Chapter summary
Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov tells Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov that he owes him a confession, and that he promised to explain why he "does not accept the world." He does it in stages, beginning with love of neighbor. He has never understood how one can love one's neighbors. He recalls reading about John the Merciful, who lay down in bed with a frozen, sick beggar, embraced him, and breathed into his purulent, foul mouth. He believes that John did it with a "lying nadryv," a love enforced by duty, a penance imposed on himself. To love a man, that man must hide himself: the moment he shows his face, love ends.
Analysis
Chapter V: The Grand Inquisitor
Chapter summary
Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov opens the poem with a literary preface that he himself calls unnecessary, and which serves to give a genre to what follows. In the sixteenth century it was customary to bring the forces of heaven down to earth in poetic works, and in Russian monasteries circulated the poem "The Mother of God Among the Torments," in which the Mother of God descends into hell and wrings from God a respite from the punishments between Good Friday and Pentecost. His poem would be of the same kind, if it had existed then. Christ appears, says nothing, and only passes by. Fifteen centuries have gone by since He promised to return, and humanity waits with the same faith while miracles grow scarce. He then wanted to descend for a moment to those who call Him, and he descends to sixteenth-century Seville, the day after an auto-da-fé in which Cardinal Grand Inquisitor burned almost a hundred heretics at once, before the king, the court, and the people.
He passes in silence, with a smile of infinite compassion, and everyone recognizes him. The people surround him, he stretches out his hands and blesses them. A man blind from childhood asks to see him, and sees. In the cathedral porch, a mother throws herself at his feet before the small open coffin of a seven-year-old girl, and He says "Talitha cumi," and the girl rises, with a bouquet of white roses in her hand. It is at that moment that the cardinal passes, an old man of nearly ninety, tall and erect, with a dry face and deep-set eyes from which a spark still shines, dressed not in yesterday's purple but in an old thick habit. He sees everything, frowns, points his finger, and orders the man arrested. The guard obeys, and the people, so tamed that they bow to the old man to the ground, open a path in silence and let themselves be blessed by him. Imprisoned in a vaulted cell of the Holy Inquisition, the prisoner receives a visit at night from the cardinal, who comes in alone with a lamp and speaks to him without waiting for a reply. He says that the people, who today kiss his feet, will tomorrow bring the coal for his bonfire, and that he does not need to say anything, because he has no right to add anything to what he has already said.
Analysis
Chapter VI: The Servant at the Gate
Chapter summary
Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov returns to his father's house seized by an unbearable anguish that grows with each step, without his being able to say what it is. He looks for causes: the end of everything that bound him to the city, his revulsion for his father's house, the spite at having talked so much "nonsense" to Alyosha, in whom he had great hopes. None of them fits. The anguish seems to him to come from outside, like a handkerchief dropped on the floor that irritates the eye before one realizes what it is. About fifteen paces from the gate he identifies it: sitting on the bench, taking the evening air, is the servant Smerdyakov.
Analysis
Chapter VII: With an Intelligent Man
Chapter summary
Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov enters the house and, on seeing Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov in the drawing room, shouts at him, waving his arms, that he is going straight to his own room and not to his, and passes him without looking at his father. The old man had come to the drawing room on purpose to tell him something, and he stays where he is, with a mocking air, watching him climb to the mezzanine. He asks Smerdyakov what is the matter with him, and hears that "who can say." He orders the samovar and for the servant to disappear, asks the usual questions about the expected visitor, and half an hour later the house is locked and the old man walks alone through the rooms, waiting for the agreed five knocks, looking at the dark windows and seeing nothing but the night.
Ivan does not sleep until two o'clock, and his thoughts cannot be counted, for they were not thoughts but something very confused and agitated. After midnight he wants to go down, go to the annex, and beat Smerdyakov, without being able to give any reason, except that the servant has become, for him, the worst of offenders. At other times he is seized by a humiliating shyness that drains his strength. He hates Alyosha, hates himself, forgets Katerina Ivanovna and is astonished at it. And he does what, later, he will remember with disgust: he rises from the divan, opens the door slowly, as one who fears being seen, goes out to the stairs and listens below as Fyodor Pavlovich stirs, five minutes at a time, with a racing heart, twice.
Analysis
Reading of the book
Analysis