I. In the Servants’ Quarters

The house of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov stood far from the very center of town, but not quite on the outskirts either. It was rather old, but had a pleasant exterior: one story, with an attic room above, painted a grayish color, and with a red iron roof. It could still stand for a very long time, however; it was roomy and snug. There were many different little storerooms in it, various hiding places and unexpected little staircases. There were rats in it, but Fyodor Pavlovich was not altogether angry with them: “All the same, it’s not so dull in the evenings when you’re left alone.” And he really was in the habit of sending the servants off for the night to the cottage in the yard and locking himself up alone in the house for the whole night. This cottage stood in the yard; it was spacious and solid; and Fyodor Pavlovich had decided that the kitchen should be there too, though the house had a kitchen of its own: kitchen smells were not to his liking, and the food was carried across the yard winter and summer. In general, the house had been built for a large family: five times as many masters and servants could have been lodged in it. But at the time of our story only Fyodor Pavlovich and Ivan Fyodorovich lived in the house, and in the servants’ cottage there were only three servants in all: old Grigory, old Marfa, his wife, and the servant Smerdyakov, still a young man. I must say a little more in detail about these three persons in service. About old Grigory Vasilyevich Kutuzov, however, we have already said enough. He was a firm and unswerving man, going stubbornly and in a straight line toward his point, if only that point, for some reason (often a surprisingly illogical one), stood before him as an unalterable truth. Generally speaking, he was honest and incorruptible. His wife, Marfa Ignatyevna, although she had bowed unquestioningly to her husband’s will all her life, had pestered him terribly, for instance, right after the emancipation of the serfs, to leave Fyodor Pavlovich, go to Moscow, and start some sort of little trade there (they had a bit of money put by); but Grigory decided then and there, once and for all, that the woman was talking nonsense, “because every woman is dishonest,” but that they ought not to leave their former master, whatever he might be himself, “because that was their duty now.”

“Do you understand what duty is?” he said, addressing Marfa Ignatyevna.

“I understand about duty, Grigory Vasilyevich, but what duty we have here to stay on, that I can’t understand at all,” Marfa Ignatyevna answered firmly.

“Then don’t understand it, but that’s how it will be. From now on, hold your tongue.”

And so it turned out: they did not leave, and Fyodor Pavlovich set them wages, small ones, and paid the wages. Grigory knew, besides, that he had an indisputable influence over his master. He felt it, and it was true: a cunning and stubborn buffoon, Fyodor Pavlovich, while of very firm character “in certain things of life,” as he himself put it, was, to his own surprise, rather weak of character in certain other “things of life.” And he knew himself which ones; he knew, and he feared a great deal. In certain things of life one had to keep one’s ears open, and it was hard to do so without a faithful man, and Grigory was the most faithful of men. It even happened that many times in the course of his career Fyodor Pavlovich might have been beaten, and beaten painfully, and Grigory always got him out of it, though each time he read him a lecture afterward. But beatings alone would not have frightened Fyodor Pavlovich: there were higher occasions, even very subtle and complex ones, when Fyodor Pavlovich himself would perhaps not have been able to define that extraordinary need for a faithful and intimate man which he sometimes suddenly began to feel within himself, instantly and incomprehensibly. These were almost morbid occasions: most depraved, and in his sensuality often cruel, like a wicked insect, Fyodor Pavlovich sometimes suddenly felt in himself, in drunken moments, a spiritual fear and a moral shock that almost, so to speak, even physically resounded in his soul. “At those times my soul seems to be fluttering right in my throat,” he used to say sometimes. It was in those moments that he liked to have near him, close by, perhaps not in the same room but in the cottage, a man like that, devoted, firm, not at all like him, not depraved, who, though he saw all the dissipation going on and knew all the secrets, would still, out of devotion, allow it all, not oppose it, above all would not reproach him and would hold no threat over him, whether for this age or the age to come; and who, in case of need, would defend him—from whom? From someone unknown, but terrible and dangerous. The point was precisely that there must be another man, an old and friendly one, so that in a sick moment he could call him, only to look into his face, perhaps to exchange a word, even some quite irrelevant word, and if the man was all right and not angry, then somehow his heart felt lighter, and if he was angry, well, then it was sadder. It happened (though extremely rarely, however) that Fyodor Pavlovich even went at night to the cottage to wake Grigory so that he would come to him for a moment. Grigory would come, and Fyodor Pavlovich would talk about the most utter trifles and soon let him go, sometimes even with a little jeer and a little joke, and he himself, with a spit, would go to bed and sleep the sleep of the righteous. Something of this sort had happened to Fyodor Pavlovich after Alyosha’s arrival too. Alyosha had “pierced his heart” by the fact that he “lived, saw everything, and condemned nothing.” More than that, he had brought with him a thing never seen before: a complete absence of contempt for him, the old man; on the contrary, a constant affection and a perfectly natural, straightforward attachment to him, who had deserved it so little. All this was a complete surprise to the old lecher and man without a family, quite unexpected for him, who until then had loved only “vileness.” When Alyosha left, he admitted to himself that he had understood something he had not wanted to understand until then.

I have already mentioned at the beginning of my story how Grigory hated Adelaida Ivanovna, Fyodor Pavlovich’s first wife and the mother of his first son, Dmitri Fyodorovich, and how, on the contrary, he defended his second wife, the shrieker Sofya Ivanovna, against his own master himself and against anyone who might take it into his head to say a bad or frivolous word about her. His sympathy for this unhappy woman had turned into something sacred, so that even twenty years later he would not have borne even a bad hint about her, from whomever it came, and would at once have answered the offender. In outward appearance Grigory was a cold and grave man, not talkative, letting out weighty, unfrivolous words. In the same way it would have been impossible to make out at first glance whether he loved his meek, submissive wife or not, and yet he really did love her, and she, of course, understood it. This Marfa Ignatyevna was a woman who was not only not stupid but perhaps even more intelligent than her spouse, at least more sensible than he in everyday affairs, and yet she submitted to him without a murmur and without answering back, from the very beginning of their marriage, and indisputably respected him for his spiritual superiority. It is remarkable that all their lives the two of them spoke extremely little with each other, except about the most necessary and current things. Grave and majestic, Grigory always thought over all his affairs and cares alone, so that Marfa Ignatyevna had long since understood, once and for all, that he had no need of her advice at all. She felt that her husband valued her silence and credited her with intelligence for it. He had never beaten her, except only once, and that lightly. In the first year of Adelaida Ivanovna’s marriage to Fyodor Pavlovich, once in the country, the village girls and women, still serfs then, were gathered in the master’s courtyard to sing and dance. They began “In the Meadows,” and suddenly Marfa Ignatyevna, still a young woman then, sprang out in front of the chorus and danced the “Russian” in a special manner, not the village way, like the peasant women, but as she used to dance when she was a house serf girl at the rich Miusovs’ in their private landowners’ theater, where a dancing master brought from Moscow taught the actors to dance. Grigory saw how his wife danced, and at home in their cottage, an hour later, he taught her a lesson, pulling her hair a little. But with that the beatings ended once and for all and were never repeated even once in their whole life, and Marfa Ignatyevna, for her part, swore off dancing from then on.

God did not give them children; there was one little baby, and that one died. But Grigory evidently loved children, and did not even hide it, that is, he was not ashamed to show it. When Adelaida Ivanovna ran away, he took Dmitri Fyodorovich into his arms, a little boy of three, and fussed over him for almost a year, combed his hair with a little comb himself, even washed him in a tub himself. Afterward he took trouble over Ivan Fyodorovich too, and over Alyosha, for which he got a slap in the face; but I have already told about all this. His own little baby, however, gladdened him only with hope, while Marfa Ignatyevna was still pregnant. When it was born, it struck his heart with grief and horror. The fact was that this boy was born with six fingers. Seeing this, Grigory was so crushed that he not only kept silent right up to the day of the christening, but deliberately went off into the garden to be silent there. It was spring, and for all three days he dug the beds in the kitchen garden. On the third day the infant was to be christened; by that time Grigory had already worked something out. Entering the cottage, where the clergy had gathered and guests had come and, finally, Fyodor Pavlovich himself, who had appeared in person as godfather, he suddenly declared that the child “ought not to be christened at all.” He declared it not loudly, did not enlarge upon it in words, barely squeezed it out word by word, but only stared dully and fixedly at the priest as he did so.

“Why so?” the priest inquired with merry surprise.

“Because it’s… a dragon…” Grigory muttered.

“How a dragon, what dragon?”

Grigory was silent for some time.

“A confusion of nature has occurred…” he muttered, very unclearly but very firmly, and evidently not wishing to enlarge on it further.

They laughed and, of course, christened the poor little baby. Grigory prayed zealously at the font, but did not change his opinion of the newborn. He did not interfere with anything, however; only, for the whole two weeks that the sickly boy lived, he hardly looked at him, did not even want to notice him, and for the most part went out of the cottage. But when the boy died of thrush after two weeks, he laid him in the little coffin himself, looked at him with deep anguish, and when they were filling in the shallow little grave, he knelt down and bowed to the ground before the little grave. For many years after that he never once mentioned his child, and Marfa Ignatyevna never once recalled her child in his presence either, and when she happened to speak with anyone about her “little one,” she spoke in a whisper, even if Grigory Vasilyevich was not there. As Marfa Ignatyevna observed, from the time of that little grave he took up chiefly with “the divine”; he read the Lives of the Saints, mostly silently and alone, each time putting on his big round silver spectacles. He rarely read aloud, except perhaps in Lent. He loved the Book of Job; he had got hold somewhere of a copy of the sayings and sermons of “our God-bearing Father Isaac the Syrian,” and read it stubbornly and for many years, understood almost exactly nothing in it, but perhaps for that very reason prized and loved this book most of all. Quite recently he had begun to listen to and look into the Khlysty, for which there turned out to be an occasion in the neighborhood; he was evidently shaken, but did not see fit to go over to the new faith. His reading in “the divine,” of course, lent his physiognomy still greater gravity.

Perhaps he was inclined to mysticism. And here, as if on purpose, the occasion of his six-fingered infant’s coming into the world and its death coincided exactly with another very strange, unexpected, and original occurrence, which left on his soul, as he himself once put it later, “a seal.” It so happened that on the very day they buried the six-fingered mite, Marfa Ignatyevna, waking in the night, heard what sounded like the crying of a newborn child. She was frightened and woke her husband. He listened and remarked that it was more likely someone moaning, “a woman, seemingly.” He got up and dressed; it was a fairly warm May night. Going out onto the porch, he could clearly hear that the moans were coming from the garden. But the garden was locked at night from the yard side, and it was impossible to get into it except by that entrance, because a strong, high fence ran all around the garden. Returning to the house, Grigory lit a lantern, took the garden key, and, paying no attention to the hysterical terror of his spouse, who still insisted that she heard a child crying and that it was surely her little boy crying and calling her, went silently into the garden. There he made out clearly that the moans were coming from their little bathhouse, which stood in the garden not far from the gate, and that it really was a woman moaning. Opening the bathhouse, he saw a sight before which he stood dumbfounded: a holy fool of the town, who roamed the streets, a familiar figure to the whole town, nicknamed Stinking Lizaveta,¹ had got into their bathhouse and had just given birth to a baby. The baby lay beside her, and she was dying beside it. She said nothing at all, if only because she could not speak. But all this needs to be explained separately.

Notes

1. 1. In Russian, Lizaveta Smerdyashchaya: smerdyashchaya means “stinking” (from smerdet’, “to stink”), the same root as the surname Smerdyakov.