I. The Elder Zosima and His Visitors

When Alyosha, with alarm and with pain in his heart, entered the elder’s cell, he stopped almost in amazement: instead of a dying man, perhaps already unconscious, as he had feared to find him, he suddenly saw him sitting in his armchair, his face worn with weakness but bright and cheerful, surrounded by visitors and holding a quiet and radiant conversation with them. He had, however, got up from his bed no more than a quarter of an hour before Alyosha arrived; the visitors had gathered in his cell earlier and were waiting for him to wake, on the firm assurance of Father Paisy that “the teacher will without doubt rise, to converse once more with those dear to his heart, as he himself declared and as he himself promised this very morning.” In this promise, and indeed in every word of the dying elder, Father Paisy believed firmly, so much so that had he seen him wholly unconscious and even no longer breathing, but had he had his promise that he would rise once more and take leave of him, he would perhaps not have believed even death itself, but would have kept waiting for the dying man to come to himself and fulfill what he had promised. And that morning, as he lay down to sleep, the elder Zosima had positively declared to him: “I shall not die before I have once more drunk my fill of converse with you, beloved of my heart, and looked upon your dear faces, and poured out my soul to you once more.” Those who had gathered for this, probably the elder’s last conversation, were the friends most devoted to him over many years. There were four of them: the hieromonks Father Iosif and Father Paisy; the hieromonk Father Mikhail, the head of the hermitage, a man not yet very old, far from being as learned, of simple origin, but firm in spirit, of unshakable and simple faith, stern in appearance but deeply moved and tender in his heart, though he evidently hid this tenderness even to the point of a sort of shame. The fourth visitor was a quite aged, simple little monk of the poorest peasant origin, Brother Anfim, very nearly unlettered even, silent and quiet, who rarely even spoke with anyone, the humblest among the most humble, and who had the look of a man frightened forever, as it were, by something great and terrible, beyond the reach of his mind. This man, who seemed always to tremble, the elder Zosima loved very much, and all his life he treated him with extraordinary respect, although perhaps with no one in all his life had he spoken fewer words than with him, even though at one time he had spent many years wandering with him, the two of them together, all over holy Russia. That was very long ago now, some forty years before, when the elder Zosima had first begun his monastic labor in a poor, little-known monastery in Kostroma, and when, soon after that, he had gone to accompany Father Anfim on his wanderings to collect donations for their poor little Kostroma monastery. Everyone, host and visitors alike, had settled in the elder’s second room, where his bed stood, a room, as was pointed out before, very cramped, so that all four of them (besides Porfiry the novice, who remained standing) barely found room around the elder’s armchair, on chairs brought in from the first room. It was already beginning to grow dark; the room was lit by the icon lamps and the wax candles before the icons. Seeing Alyosha, who was embarrassed on entering and had stopped in the doorway, the elder smiled at him joyfully and held out his hand.

“Greetings, my quiet one, greetings, my dear, here you are. I knew you would come.”

Alyosha went up to him, bowed down to the ground before him, and wept. Something was bursting from his heart, his soul was trembling, he wanted to sob.

“Come now, wait a while before you mourn me,” the elder said with a smile, and laid his right hand on his head. “You see, here I sit and talk; perhaps I shall live another twenty years yet, as that kind, dear woman from Vyshegorye wished me yesterday, the one with the little girl Lizaveta in her arms. Remember, O Lord, both the mother and the little girl Lizaveta! (He crossed himself.) Porfiry, that gift of hers, did you carry it where I told you?”

He was recalling the sixty kopecks given yesterday by the cheerful pilgrim woman, to be handed on to “some woman poorer than me.” Offerings of this kind are made as penances, taken upon oneself voluntarily for one reason or another, and always from money earned by one’s own labor. The elder had sent Porfiry the evening before to a townswoman of ours, a widow with children, who had lately been burned out and had taken to begging after the fire. Porfiry hastened to report that the thing was already done and that he had given it, as he had been told, “from an unknown benefactress.”

“Get up, my dear,” the elder went on to Alyosha, “let me look at you. Have you been to your family, and did you see your brother?”

It seemed strange to Alyosha that he asked so firmly and precisely about only one of his brothers—but which one? It must be, then, that it was for this brother’s sake, perhaps, that he had sent him away from himself both yesterday and today.

“I saw one of my brothers,” Alyosha answered.

“I mean that one from yesterday, the eldest, to whom I bowed down to the ground.”

“Him I saw only yesterday, and today I could not find him anywhere,” said Alyosha.

“Make haste to find him, go again tomorrow and make haste, leave everything and make haste. Perhaps you will still be in time to prevent something terrible. Yesterday I bowed down before his great future suffering.”

He suddenly fell silent and seemed to be lost in thought. The words were strange. Father Iosif, who had witnessed the elder’s bow to the ground the day before, exchanged glances with Father Paisy. Alyosha could not contain himself.

“Father and teacher,” he said in extraordinary agitation, “your words are too obscure… What suffering is it that awaits him?”

“Do not be curious. Yesterday I seemed to see something terrible… as though his look yesterday expressed his whole destiny. There was a certain look of his… such that I was instantly horrified in my heart at what this man is preparing for himself. Once or twice in my life I have seen the same expression on certain faces… as if it pictured the whole destiny of those people, and their destiny, alas, came true. I sent you to him, Alexei, because I thought that your brotherly face would help him. But all things are from the Lord, and all our destinies too. ‘If a grain of wheat falls into the earth and does not die, it remains a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.’ Remember this. And you, Alexei, I have many times blessed in my thoughts during my life for your face, know this,” the elder said with a quiet smile. “This is my thought of you: you will go forth from these walls, and yet you will abide in the world as a monk. You will have many adversaries, but even your very enemies will love you. Life will bring you many misfortunes, but through them you will be happy, and you will bless life and make others bless it, which is the most important thing of all. Well, that is what you are like. My fathers and teachers,” he turned to his visitors, smiling tenderly, “never until this day have I told, not even him, why the face of this young man was so dear to my soul. Only now will I tell it: his face was to me as it were a reminder and a prophecy. At the dawn of my days, when I was still a small child, I had an elder brother who died as a youth, before my eyes, only seventeen years old. And afterward, as I went through my life, I gradually became convinced that this brother of mine had been in my destiny as it were a sign and a foreordaining from on high, for had he not appeared in my life, had he not been at all, I would never perhaps, so I think, have taken monastic orders and entered upon this precious path. That first appearance was still in my childhood, and now, toward the close of my journey, there has appeared to me before my very eyes something like its repetition. It is a wonderful thing, fathers and teachers, that, without being so very like him in face, but only somewhat, Alexei seemed to me so much like him in spirit that many times I took him as it were for that very youth, my brother, who had come to me mysteriously at the end of my journey, for a certain remembrance and insight, so that I even wondered at myself and at such a strange dream of mine. Do you hear this, Porfiry?” he turned to the novice who was attending him. “Many times I have seen on your face something like distress that I love Alexei more than you. Now you know why it was so, but I love you too, know that, and many times I grieved that you were distressed. And to you, dear visitors, I wish to tell of this youth, my brother, for there has been nothing in my life more precious than this, more prophetic and more moving. My heart is touched, and at this moment I behold my whole life, as though living it all through again…”

Here I must remark that this last conversation of the elder with the visitors who came to him on the last day of his life has been preserved in part in writing. Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov wrote it down from memory some time after the elder’s death. But whether this was wholly the conversation of that evening, or whether he added to it in his notes from earlier conversations with his teacher as well, that I can no longer decide; besides, in these notes the elder’s whole speech runs on as if without a break, as though he were setting out his life in the form of a tale, addressing his friends, whereas, without doubt, judging by later accounts, in reality it went somewhat differently, for the conversation that evening was a general one, and although the visitors interrupted their host little, still they spoke from themselves as well, joining in the conversation, perhaps even telling and relating something of their own; besides, there could not have been such an unbroken flow in this narrative, for the elder sometimes gasped for breath, lost his voice, and even lay down on his bed to rest, though he did not fall asleep, and the visitors did not leave their places. Once or twice the conversation was interrupted by a reading from the Gospel; Father Paisy read. It is remarkable, too, that none of them, however, supposed that he would die that very night, all the more since on this last evening of his life, after his deep sleep during the day, he suddenly seemed to have found a new strength in himself, which sustained him all through this long conversation with his friends. It was as it were a last tenderness of heart, which sustained an incredible animation in him, but only for a short time, for his life broke off suddenly… But of that later. For now I wish to inform the reader that, rather than setting out all the details of the conversation, I have preferred to confine myself only to the elder’s story according to the manuscript of Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov. It will be shorter, and not so tiring, although, of course, I repeat this, Alyosha took much from earlier conversations as well and put it all together.