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The Brothers Karamazov · Book VIII

Mitya

GuiltFamilySufferingJustice and Law

Summary of the book

Book VIII is a race. In the earlier books the characters talk; here Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov runs after three thousand rubles to return to Katerina Ivanovna before running away with Grushenka, and each chapter is an attempt that fails: old Samsonov, who sends him by way of mockery to a drunken peasant; the peasant himself, who does not wake up; Madame Khokhlakova, who promises millions and does not have a thousand. When the last lead falls apart, Mitya jumps his father's wall, where the scene cuts between two paragraphs and resumes with the servant Grigory lying fallen; he runs off, finds out that Grushenka has gone to meet the officer of five years before, retrieves the pistols and orders champagne with a wad of banknotes that he explains to no one, and goes to Mokroye to see her once and to kill himself at sunrise. What he finds is a woman who does not love the officer and calls him to stay. Before dawn, the authorities wake him to accuse him of a crime that the reader saw begin and did not see end.

Chapter I: Mitya Goes to Old Samsonov

Chapter summary

While Grushenka sets off for her new life, Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov knows nothing, and for two days he has lived in such agitation that, the narrator says, he might well have fallen ill with brain fever. He cannot decipher Grushenka, who loves him and torments him, and reduces everything to one alternative: him or Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. Of the officer she was waiting for, from whom he had received a letter a month before, he does not even think: the struggle with his father takes up everything. He dreams of a new and "virtuous" life far from there, but to carry it out he needs money, and he refuses to spend hers. He may know where to find the money (the narrator postpones the explanation), but to get it he must first return the three thousand rubles to Katerina Ivanovna:

Analysis

я карманный вор, я подлец, а новую жизнь я не хочу начинать подлецом, I am a pickpocket, I am a scoundrel, and I do not want to begin a new life as a scoundrel.

Mitya measures his new life by honor, not by law: the debt to Katya is what keeps him from being, with Grushenka, the man he wants to be. The verb matters, to begin: it is not enough that she accept him, he must arrive clean. It is the same word, scoundrel, with which he called himself before Alyosha two days earlier, and which the chapter will repeat.

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Chapter II: Lyagavy

Chapter summary

To run to Ilinskoye he has not a kopeck to his name: two twenty-kopeck coins are all that remain. He sells an old silver watch, stopped, for six rubles at a jeweler's in the bazaar, borrows three more from the tenants, who hand them over even though they are the last of what they have, and, carried away, tells them the whole plan. The narrator notes in passing that on the eve of a certain event, at noon, Mitya did not have a kopeck and sold the watch and borrowed money "in front of witnesses." He arrives late: the road to Volovya is eighteen versts, not twelve; the priest of Ilinskoye has already gone; it is nearly night when he finds him, a shy man, who takes him on foot, along a verst that turns out to be three, to Sukhoy Possyolok, where Lyagavy, whose real name is Gorstkin, sleeps drunk on a bench in a cabin stifling with heat. Mitya tries to wake him, shakes him, and gets only grunts. The priest suggests waiting until morning, and Mitya, in despair, exclaims:

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Chapter III: The Gold Mines

Chapter summary

It is the visit by Mitya that Grushenka had told Rakitin about with such fright: to rid herself of him, she had asked him to take her to Samsonov's house, where she said she had to "count money," and to come back at eleven to fetch her; Mitya accepted, happily, because while she was there she would not be with Fyodor Pavlovich. After leaving her, he runs home, jealous as ever, and the narrator opens here a parenthesis on jealousy, citing Pushkin:

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Chapter IV: In the Garden

Chapter summary

Mitya concludes that Grushenka can only be with his father. He circles Fyodor Pavlovich's house by a deserted lane and climbs the fence at the spot where, according to rumor, Lizaveta Smerdyashchaya once crossed. In the garden he walks slowly, crouches behind the elder and viburnum bushes, and looks through the lit window. He sees his father alone, in a new dressing gown and fine shirt, a red band on his forehead, drinking half a glass of cognac and examining in the mirror the bruises Mitya left on him. No sign of Grushenka. But he cannot tell whether she is behind the screen. Unable to bear the doubt, he taps on the glass the signal agreed between the old man and Smerdyakov, two faint taps and three quick ones, which means "Grushenka has arrived." Fyodor Pavlovich throws himself at the window, puts out his head and shoulders, and speaks in a trembling voice: "Where are you, little angel? I have a little present for you!" Mitya, from the side, sees the profile lit by the lamp, and the rage he had described to Alyosha returns in full:

Analysis

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Chapter V: Mitya's Decision

Chapter summary

Mitya goes back into Fenya's kitchen and seizes her by the neck. She tells him everything at once: Grushenka went to Mokroye to meet the officer of five years ago, the one who abandoned her and has come back from Siberia. He lets go of her, turns white and mute, grasps it all in an instant, and gets lost in one question that haunts him: how could he have forgotten that officer, from the moment he learned of him? He then begins questioning her calmly and precisely. Fenya, watching his hands covered in blood, answers everything, down to Grushenka's message (she loved him for one hour), which he hears smiling. Before leaving, he tells Fenya there is a high and terrible fence, but that at sunrise Mitya will jump it, and that she should remember him forever.

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Chapter VI: The Road to Mokroye

Chapter summary

The troika covers the twenty-odd versts in a little over an hour, and the ride refreshes Mitya. It was the same night, and perhaps the same hour, in which Alyosha, lying on the ground, swore to love the earth forever. Mitya feels no jealousy of the officer. If she has returned to her first love, the right is his, and Mitya must "give way." The decision was born there in Fenya's kitchen, without reasoning, and yet it leaves his soul confused. At one point he thinks of stopping the carriage, taking out the loaded pistol, and ending it at once. But the idea of seeing her, even from afar, takes hold of him entirely. He asks Andrei whether they are not too late, and the coachman supposes that they are. Then he remembers that Timofey spoke of some gentlemen playing cards at the Plastunov inn. Andrei, afraid of offending him, says what troubles him: Fenya knelt before Mitya and begged him not to ruin his mistress "and someone else," and he is driving him there. Mitya grabs him by the shoulders:

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Chapter VII: The Rival in the Wig

Chapter summary

Grushenka cries out on seeing him. Mitya, stammering, asks "a traveler" for the right to stay in the same room until morning. The Pole with the pipe, the pan, refuses: "we are here in private." But Kalganov invites him to sit, and Grushenka, seeing that he will not make a scene, is delighted and says she wants him to stay, and that if he leaves, she will leave. Mitya weeps, laughs, drinks the champagne in one gulp, and becomes as meek as a dog taken back in. He observes the two Poles: one short and fat, with a bad wig made in Siberia and starched mustaches, and the other tall and silent, Vrublevsky, always standing. He accepts everything he sees without surprise. Kalganov and Maksimov tell the story of the lame widow whom Maksimov married, and of the beating he took because of Piron. Mitya toasts Poland and then Russia, and the Poles drink only "to Russia within the borders of 1772." He calls them fools, they nearly fight, and Grushenka silences them. They play cards. Mitya loses two hundred rubles at the bank, until Kalganov covers the card with his hand and forbids it. At that moment, looking at Grushenka's face, Mitya has a new idea.

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Chapter VIII: The Party and the Arrest

Chapter summary

An almost orgy begins. Grushenka asks for wine so she can get drunk as she did last time. Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov, as if delirious, serves everyone, orders chocolate for the girls and samovars of tea and punch for anyone who arrives, and gives her the armchair by the door, the same one from which she watched the chorus a month before. She sends him away, calls him back, asks how he learned about her, and whether he really meant to kill himself the next day ("maybe tomorrow I'll tell you a little word"). Kalganov grows sick of the songs and dances, of the girls dressed as bears, and of a song in which the gentleman, the gypsy, the soldier, and the merchant want to know whether they are loved. He falls asleep on the sofa. Maksimov dances a sabotière and asks Mitya, in a low voice, to introduce him to one of the girls.

Mitya steps out onto the wooden balcony and, alone in the dark, takes his head in both hands, and everything lights up at once. If he is going to kill himself, it would have to be now, in this filthy corner. But the phantom that pursued him, the officer, has become something small and comical, locked in a room. And she, ashamed, lets her eyes show whom she loves. Now all that is left is to live, and that is not possible. He prays: "God, raise up the one fallen by the fence! Take this terrible cup from me!" Then, suddenly, a ray of hope: if the old man lives, he will return the money, and the shame that remains will fit in his heart. He sees Trifon Borisovich, gloomy, who says he is not looking for him, that it is already three in the morning, and nothing more.

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