Summary of the book
In a single day, the death of Elder Zosima puts to the test what Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov expects of God. The body begins to smell too soon, the monastery splits between those who weep, those who exult, and those who use the smell against the eldership, and Alyosha, who does not doubt God, cannot bear to see the most righteous of men exposed to the laughter of a crowd beneath him. Having eaten nothing since the day before, he lets himself be taken by Rakitin to Grushenka's house, where one expected to see the fall of the righteous man and the other intended to devour him, and the opposite of what the two had planned happens: he, who went there to be lost, and she, who had summoned him to destroy him, give each other a word without calculation. Back at the coffin, he falls asleep listening to the Gospel of Cana, dreams of the master alive at the feast, and goes out to kiss the earth. The question the book leaves is what sustains a faith when the expected sign does not come, and a visit without a name comes instead.
Chapter I: The Smell from the Coffin
Chapter summary
Father Paissy prepares the body of Elder Zosima alone, according to the rite of the monks, and places it in the coffin in the first room of the cell, where the old man used to receive visitors. Because he had been a priest of the great habit (hieroschemamonk), the Gospel is read over him rather than the Psalter; Paissy wants to read day and night, but first he must calm the agitation growing among the monks and among the laypeople who come from the guesthouse and the town, some with sick people in their arms, above all children, waiting for an immediate cure: only now is it clear how much everyone had held him to be a proven saint. He calls the impatience frivolity, unworthy of monks, and admits to himself, deep down, that he expects the same. He is wary of two faces in the crowd: Rakitin, whom Madame Khokhlakova sent to the hermitage to write to her every half hour about what was happening, and the monk from Obdorsk, who runs from corner to corner, irritated that nothing is happening. On his rounds he finds Alyosha weeping alone, with his back to the hermitage, over the gravestone of the old ascetic Iov, and he lets him weep: Christ has sent him those tears.
Analysis
Before three in the afternoon what the narrator says he prefers to keep silent happens, and he tells it only because it marked the hero: from the coffin begins to rise, slowly and then undoubtedly, a smell of corruption. For him, two causes combined: the old hostility to the eldership, which survived in many monks as a harmful novelty, and the envy of the dead man's holiness, so firmly established in life that it seemed forbidden to discuss it. Zosima had won people more through love than through miracles, and for that very reason he made envious people and enemies, even beyond the walls; it is enough to repeat the question "why do they hold him to be so holy?" to open an abyss of resentment. When the smell appears, some rejoice more than the unbelievers, and the narrator recalls the dead man's own phrase:
«любят люди падение праведного и позор его»
, people love the fall of the righteous and his shame.
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Chapter II: The Justice That Was Lacking
Chapter summary
The narrator interrupts the scene to explain Alyosha before judging him. To Paissy's question, whether he too is among those of little faith, he would have answered no: all his disturbance was born of having believed too much. But the disturbance existed, and it was so painful that years later he counted it among the heaviest days of his life. Whoever smiles at the young man's purity, says the narrator, should remember that a young man who is too sensible is worth little. And he clarifies what Alyosha still has to understand: Alyosha did not need the miracle to make an idea triumph, but a face: all the love he carried into the world had that year concentrated on the dead master, to the point that he forgot that day his brother Dmitri, whom he had worried over so much the day before, and the two hundred rubles he had promised to take to Ilyusha's father. And he adds what had wounded him:
Analysis
Chapter III: Grushenka's Onion
Chapter summary
Grushenka lives near the Cathedral Square, in a wooden pavilion rented from the widow Morozova, where the old merchant Samsonov, her protector, had installed her four years earlier, a frightened and thin girl of eighteen, and from which she gradually emerged as a decisive woman, good at business, who even bought promissory notes for a pittance in partnership with Fyodor Pavlovich. Grushenka is waiting this night, dressed in black silk and a lace cap, for news: the officer who seduced and abandoned her five years ago is traveling and will send a courier from Mokroye. She had lied to Mitya that she would spend the night counting money with Samsonov, and when Rakitin and Alyosha arrive she gives a cry, thinking it is the captain breaking down the door. On recognizing them, she calms down and rejoices, to Alyosha's own astonishment, for he had seen her the day before cruel to Katerina Ivanovna, and now finds another woman, simple and quick. Rakitin claims the champagne she had promised him for bringing him.
Grushenka sits on Alyosha's lap, laughing, and tells him that she can jump off if he commands it; he does not move, because the pain swallows everything, and he is astonished that he does not feel the old fear of women, only a pure curiosity.
Analysis
Chapter IV: The Wedding at Cana
Chapter summary
It is late by the monastery's customs when Alyosha enters the cell where the coffin is. Only Paissy, who reads the Gospel without looking at it, and the novice Porfiry, asleep on the floor of the other room, are there. Alyosha kneels in a corner; he no longer has the tearful piety of the morning, and a clear joy fills his mind. The window is open, the air is fresh, and the thought of the smell, which in the morning had seemed infamous, no longer troubles him. He prays at times with ardor, at other times almost mechanically, and he falls asleep listening to Paissy read the Gospel of Cana.
Analysis
Reading of the book
Analysis