I. They Arrive at the Monastery

It was a fine, warm, clear day. It was the end of August. The meeting with the elder had been arranged for right after the late liturgy, at about half past eleven. Our visitors to the monastery, however, did not come to the liturgy, but arrived just as it was over. They came in two carriages; in the first, a smart open carriage drawn by a pair of expensive horses, came Pyotr Alexandrovich Miusov with a distant relative of his, a very young man of about twenty, Pyotr Fomich Kalganov. This young man was preparing to enter the university; but Miusov, with whom for some reason he was living for the time being, was tempting him to come abroad with him, to Zurich or Jena, to enter the university there and finish his course. The young man had not yet made up his mind. He was thoughtful and seemed absentminded. He had a pleasant face, a strong build, and was rather tall. There was at times a strange fixity in his gaze: like all very absentminded people, he would sometimes look straight at you for a long time without seeing you at all. He was taciturn and somewhat awkward, but it happened—though only ever when he was alone with someone—that he would suddenly become terribly talkative, impetuous, quick to laugh, laughing sometimes God knows at what. But his animation died out just as quickly and suddenly as it was born. He was always well and even elegantly dressed: he already had some independent fortune and expected a much larger one. He and Alyosha were friends.

In a very decrepit, rattling, but roomy hired carriage, drawn by a pair of old pinkish-gray horses, which lagged far behind Miusov’s carriage, came Fyodor Pavlovich with his dear son Ivan Fyodorovich. Dmitri Fyodorovich had been told the day and the hour the evening before, but he was late. The visitors left their carriages at the inn by the wall and went through the monastery gates on foot. Apart from Fyodor Pavlovich, the other three, it seems, had never seen a monastery of any kind, and Miusov had not been inside a church for perhaps thirty years. He looked around with a certain curiosity, not without a certain assumed nonchalance. But to his observant mind the interior of the monastery offered nothing besides church buildings and outbuildings, very ordinary ones at that. The last of the people were coming out of the church, taking off their caps and crossing themselves. Among the common people there were also visitors of higher society, two or three ladies and one very old general; they were all staying at the inn. Beggars surrounded our visitors at once, but no one gave them anything. Only Petrusha Kalganov took a ten-kopeck piece out of his purse and, flustered and embarrassed God knows why, hastily thrust it at one of the women, saying quickly: “Share it equally.” None of his companions remarked on it, so he had no reason to be embarrassed, but noticing this, he became even more embarrassed.

It was strange, however; by rights they ought to have been expected, and perhaps even with some honor: one of them had recently donated a thousand rubles, and the other was a very rich landowner and a highly educated man, so to speak, on whom they all depended here to some extent over the fishing in the river, given the turn the lawsuit might take. And yet no one in an official capacity came to meet them. Miusov looked absentmindedly at the gravestones around the church and was about to remark that these graves must have cost the people who buried them a pretty penny for the right to be buried in such a “holy” place, but he kept silent: simple liberal irony was turning in him almost into anger.

“Devil take it, whom does one ask here, in this muddle… This needs settling, because time is passing,” he said suddenly, as if talking to himself.

Suddenly an elderly, balding gentleman in a loose summer coat and with sweet little eyes came up to them. Raising his hat and lisping honey-sweetly, he introduced himself to everyone in general as Maximov, a landowner from Tula. He at once entered into our travelers’ concern.

“The elder Zosima lives in the hermitage, shut away in the hermitage, about four hundred paces from the monastery, through the little wood, through the little wood…”

“I know that too, sir, that it’s through the little wood,” Fyodor Pavlovich answered him, “but we don’t quite remember the way, we haven’t been here in a long time.”

“Why, through these gates, and straight through the little wood… the little wood. Let’s go. If you please… I myself… I’ll… This way, this way…”

They went out through the gates and set off through the wood. The landowner Maximov, a man of about sixty, did not so much walk as, better to say, almost run alongside, examining them all with a convulsive, almost impossible curiosity. There was something goggle-eyed in his eyes.

“You see, we are going to this elder on business of our own,” Miusov remarked sternly; “we have, so to speak, been granted an audience ‘by this personage,’ and so, though we are grateful to you for showing us the way, we will not ask you to come in with us.”

“I’ve been, I’ve been, I’ve already been… Un chevalier parfait!” And the landowner snapped his fingers in the air.

“Who is a chevalier?” asked Miusov.

“The elder, the magnificent elder, the elder. The honor and glory of the monastery, Zosima. Such an elder…”

But his disorderly speech was interrupted by a little monk in a cowl who had caught up with the travelers, short, very pale, and haggard. Fyodor Pavlovich and Miusov stopped. With an extremely polite bow, almost from the waist, the monk said:

“After your visit to the hermitage, gentlemen, the Father Abbot most humbly asks you all to dine with him. At one o’clock, no later. And you too,” he turned to Maximov.

“That I will do without fail!” cried Fyodor Pavlovich, terribly pleased by the invitation. “Without fail. And you know, we have all given our word to behave decently here… And you, Pyotr Alexandrovich, will you come?”

“Why, of course I will! Why else did I come here, if not to see all their customs? There is only one thing that troubles me, namely that I am with you now, Fyodor Pavlovich…”

“Yes, Dmitri Fyodorovich doesn’t exist yet.”

“And it would be splendid if he failed to come. Do you think I enjoy this whole mess of yours, and with you thrown in? So we’ll come to dinner; thank the Father Abbot,” he turned to the little monk.

“No, it is my duty to conduct you to the elder himself,” answered the monk.

“And I, if that is so, will go to the Father Abbot, meanwhile I’ll go straight to the Father Abbot,” twittered the landowner Maximov.

“The Father Abbot is occupied at the present hour, but as you please…” the monk said hesitantly.

“A most importunate little old man,” Miusov remarked aloud when the landowner Maximov had run back toward the monastery.

“He looks like von Sohn,” Fyodor Pavlovich said suddenly.

“That’s all you know about… Why on earth does he look like von Sohn? Have you ever seen von Sohn yourself?”

“I’ve seen his photograph. Not in the features of his face, but in something inexpressible. The purest second copy of von Sohn. I always recognize it by the physiognomy alone.”

“Perhaps so; you are a connoisseur in that line. Only here’s the thing, Fyodor Pavlovich: you were pleased to mention yourself just now that we have given our word to behave decently, remember. I tell you, restrain yourself. And if you start playing the buffoon, I have no intention of being put on the same level with you here… You see what kind of man he is,” he said to the monk. “I’m afraid to go in among decent people with him.”

On the monk’s pale, bloodless lips appeared a thin, silent little smile, not without a cunning of its own kind, but he made no answer, and it was all too clear that he kept silent out of self-respect. Miusov frowned still more.

“Oh, devil take the lot of them, a façade worked out over centuries, and in essence charlatanism and nonsense!” flashed through his head.

“Here’s the hermitage, we’ve arrived!” cried Fyodor Pavlovich. “The wall, and the gates locked.”

And he set about making large signs of the cross before the saints painted above the gates and beside them.

“You don’t bring your own rule into someone else’s monastery,” he remarked. “Here in the hermitage there are twenty-five saints in all working out their salvation, looking at each other and eating cabbage. And not one woman ever goes through these gates, that’s what’s especially remarkable. And it really is so. Only how is it that I’ve heard the elder receives ladies?” he turned suddenly to the little monk.

“Women of the common people are here now too, over there, lying by the little gallery, waiting. And for ladies of higher rank two little rooms have been built right here on the gallery, but outside the wall, these very windows here, and the elder comes out to them through an inner passage when he is well enough, that is, still outside the wall. Just now a lady, a landowner from Kharkov, Mrs. Khokhlakova, is waiting with her invalid daughter. He has probably promised to come out to them, though lately he has grown so weak that he hardly appears even before the people.”

“So there’s a little loophole leading from the hermitage to the ladies after all. Don’t think, holy father, that I mean anything, I’m just saying. You know, on Athos, have you heard, not only are visits from women not allowed, but there are no women at all, and no creatures of the female sex whatsoever, little hens, little turkey hens, little heifers…”

“Fyodor Pavlovich, I will go back and leave you here alone, and without me they will lead you out of here by the arms, I prophesy it.”

“And how am I bothering you, Pyotr Alexandrovich? Just look,” he cried suddenly, stepping inside the wall of the hermitage, “look what a valley of roses they live in!”

And indeed, though there were no roses now, there were a great many rare and beautiful autumn flowers wherever they could possibly be planted. An experienced hand was evidently tending them. There were flower beds within the church enclosures and between the graves. The little house in which the elder’s cell was, a one-story wooden house with a gallery in front of the entrance, was also surrounded by flowers.

“And was it like this under the previous elder, Varsonofy? They say he didn’t care for elegance, he’d jump up and beat even the ladies with a stick,” Fyodor Pavlovich remarked as he went up the steps.

“The elder Varsonofy did at times seem almost like a holy fool, but a lot of foolishness is told, too. He never beat anyone with a stick,” answered the little monk. “Now, gentlemen, wait a moment, I will announce you.”

“Fyodor Pavlovich, for the last time, the condition, do you hear? Behave yourself, or I’ll pay you back,” Miusov managed to mutter once more.

“I can’t imagine why you’re in such a great state of agitation,” Fyodor Pavlovich remarked mockingly. “Or are you afraid of your little sins? They say he can tell by your eyes what you’ve come with. And how highly you value their opinion, you, such a Parisian and progressive gentleman, you’ve even surprised me, I must say!”

But Miusov had no time to answer this sarcasm; they were asked to come in. He went in somewhat irritated…

“Well, I know myself in advance: I’m irritated, I’ll start arguing, I’ll get heated, and I’ll degrade both myself and the idea,” flashed through his head.