Ilyusha Snegiryov

Who He Is

Ilyusha Snegiryov is the nine-year-old son of the retired captain Nikolai Ilyich Snegiryov, a pale, sickly boy with sparkling black eyes, in an old coat he has outgrown and a torn shoe (ch. III of Book IV). He lives in a crowded hut with his mother, Arina Petrovna, his sister Varvara and the youngest, Nina, hunchbacked and with withered legs (ch. VI of Book IV). At school the classmates call his father a sponge, after Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov dragged him by the beard from the tavern to the square, and Ilyusha, who saw it all, began to defend him against everyone (ch. VII of Book IV). What he wants is to protect his father and avenge the humiliation, and what consumes him afterwards is the guilt of having thrown a dog a piece of bread with a pin in it (ch. IV of Book X). Consumptive, according to Smurov (ch. III of Book X), he dies two days after Mitya's sentence (ch. III of the Epilogue). The trait that defines him is a love that knows how to speak only through gesture: he bites, stabs, weeps, begs.

Trajectory

In ch. III of Book IV he is on the other side of the ditch, alone, with his pockets full of stones, against six classmates who throw at him, and he hits Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov with one when the boys shout that he is a Karamazov. Alyosha places himself in front of the stones and goes to speak to him, and the boy calls him a monk in trousers, throws the biggest stone he had at his back and, seeing that Alyosha does not retaliate, leaps on him and sinks his teeth into his middle finger for ten seconds. Alyosha asks what he is guilty of before him, and the boy breaks into tears and runs off without answering.

In ch. V of Book IV Katerina Ivanovna tells Alyosha the scene in the square, in which the captain's son ran alongside, weeping and asking everyone to defend his father, and everyone laughed. In ch. VI of Book IV, lying feverish behind the curtain, Ilyusha cries out to his father not to be deceived, that Alyosha came to complain, and that it was he who bit his finger. Alyosha understands everything: the boy is good, loves his father, and flung himself on him as on the brother of the offender.

In ch. VII of Book IV the father recounts what happened afterwards. Ilyusha got up alone against the classmates, for his father's honour and for the truth, and on the walks to the big stone at the edge of the pasture he asked him not to make peace:

When his father spoke to him of another town, of a horse and a cart, the boy was delighted, and then, coming back from school gloomy, he wrapped his arms around his father's neck by the stone and wept:

When his father tramples Katerina Ivanovna's banknotes, it is to him that he refers, in tears:

From what Kolya tells Alyosha in ch. IV of Book X, Ilyusha, prompted by Smerdyakov, stuck a pin into a piece of bread and threw it to a yard dog, Zhuchka, who swallowed it, yelped and ran off. Ilyusha confessed in tears, repeating that she ran and yelped. When Kolya Krasotkin broke the pact, Ilyusha said he would throw bread with pins to all the dogs, and when the classmates threw themselves on him over the sponge business he crossed glances with Kolya, who was watching, and stabbed him with a penknife in the thigh. He fell ill, raving that he had killed Zhuchka and that God was punishing him.

In ch. V of Book X he has been in bed for two weeks, beside the corner of the icons, and Alyosha has reconciled him with the boys one by one, without calf-like tenderness. Kolya is missing, and his absence weighs most. When Kolya arrives and whistles, Perezvon comes in on his hind legs:

In ch. VII of Book X, after the doctor's prognosis, which sees salvation only in the climate of Syracuse, he takes Kolya by the hand and embraces his father and his friend together. He asks his father for what his father cannot give:

And he makes the request that the book will fulfil:

The father, away from his son, in a wild whisper, answers that he does not want another boy:

In ch. II of Book XII, in court, the captain arrives in rags and drunk, and refuses to describe the humiliation, because his dying son asked him not to:

In ch. III of the Epilogue, Ilyusha died two days after the sentence. As he died, he asked his friends for what he could not ask of his father:

In the blue coffin with white frills, full of flowers, the boy lies with his little hands crossed. The father wants to bury him beside the stone:

He gives way when he hears that singing can be heard in the church porch, but he crumbles over the grave the bread the boy asked for:

Themes Embodied

Ilyusha is the real suffering child, at the point where the novel draws from Suffering the abstraction of Ivan's revolt. His suffering has a father, has a stone and has bread, and what the book shows of him is not the horror of the newspapers that Ivan collects, but the sequence of gestures of someone who loves and cannot protect: he bites Alyosha's finger, stabs Kolya, asks his father to love another boy and to bury him beside the stone. He is also the boy who blames himself for the death of Zhuchka, and the guilt appears in his delirium as the opposite of the innocence that Ivan claims for children (ch. IV of Book X); the theme is that of Guilt, lived from below. The request for burial, the stone and the bread for the sparrows link him to the stone of Ilyusha and to bread and stones (ch. VII of Book X, ch. III of the Epilogue).

Each of Ilyusha's gestures is an attempt to protect a father who cannot be protected: he reacts to the square (ch. VII of Book IV), bites Alyosha, taking him for the brother of the offender (ch. VI of Book IV), and, dying, asks his friends to stay with his father (ch. III of the Epilogue). With this, Ilyusha organises the others around an absence: Kolya, Alyosha, the boys and the father himself are given a task, that of guarding the stone, and it is this task that closes the novel. The text does not say that he understands what he does; it shows what the gestures produce.

Divergent Readings

The book stages two ways of reading a child's suffering, and Ilyusha fits both. Ivan, in The Revolt, says that the little children have eaten nothing and are not yet guilty of anything:

Zosima, taking leave of the monks, says that each is guilty before all:

On Ivan's reading, Ilyusha is the case: a humiliated, sick child who suffers without having done what punishes him, and whose death would not be compensated by any future harmony. On Zosima's reading, the boy recognises himself as guilty, of the dog and of the humiliation his father suffered (ch. IV of Book X), and the delirium shows that the guilt of all before all can fit inside the body of a boy. The novel does not choose: the burial (ch. III of the Epilogue) answers with an agreement among boys, not with a thesis, and the bread for the sparrows is an answer of another kind to the bread of the Grand Inquisitor, which buys obedience.

Relationships

• Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov: the adult he bites (ch. III of Book IV), who reconciles him with his classmates (ch. V of Book X) and who speaks beside the stone (ch. III of the Epilogue).
• Kolya Krasotkin: the only friend and protector, whom he stabbed, who abandons him and who returns with Perezvon (ch. IV of Book X, ch. V of Book X).
• Smerdyakov: the servant who teaches him to hide the pin in the bread (ch. IV of Book X).
• Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov: the offender of his father, whose humiliation he watched from the square (ch. VII of Book IV).
• Katerina Ivanovna: Mitya's fiancee, who sends the two hundred rubles, pays for the Moscow doctor and the grave by the church porch (ch. V of Book IV, ch. V of Book X, ch. III of the Epilogue).
• Lise Khokhlakova: the girl who weeps when she hears his story from Alyosha (ch. I of Book V) and sends flowers to the coffin (ch. III of the Epilogue).