III. The Confession of an Ardent Heart. In Verse

Alyosha, having heard his father’s order, which the old man had shouted to him from the carriage as he drove away from the monastery, remained for some time where he was, in great perplexity. Not that he stood there like a post; that did not happen to him. On the contrary, for all his uneasiness, he managed at once to go to the abbot’s kitchen and find out what his papa had done upstairs. Then, however, he set off, trusting that on the way to town he would somehow manage to solve the problem that was tormenting him. I will say in advance: he was not in the least afraid of his father’s shouts and the order to move home “with pillows and mattress.” He understood only too well that the order to move, given aloud and with such showy shouting, had been given “in a fit of enthusiasm,” even for effect, so to speak—like the tradesman in their own little town who had gone on a spree not long before, at his own name-day party, and in front of his guests, angry that they would not give him any more vodka, suddenly began smashing his own dishes, tearing his own and his wife’s clothes, breaking his furniture, and finally the windows in the house, and all, again, for effect; and something of the same sort, of course, had now happened with his papa. The next day, of course, the tradesman who had gone on the spree, having sobered up, regretted the broken cups and plates. Alyosha knew that the old man too would surely let him go back to the monastery the very next day, perhaps even that same day. And besides, he was fully certain that his father might wish to wrong anyone else, but not him. Alyosha was certain that nobody in the whole world would ever wish to wrong him, and not only would not wish to but could not. This was an axiom for him, given once and for all, without argument, and in this sense he went forward without any hesitation.

But at that moment another fear was stirring in him, of quite another kind, and all the more tormenting because he could not have defined it himself: namely, a fear of a woman, and precisely of Katerina Ivanovna, who had so insistently begged him, in the note handed to him earlier by Mrs. Khokhlakova, to come to her for some reason. This demand, and the necessity of going without fail, had at once instilled a sort of tormenting feeling in his heart, and all morning, the further it went, the more, more and more painfully, this feeling ached in him, in spite of all the scenes and adventures that followed in the monastery, and just now at the abbot’s, and so on, and so on. He was not afraid because he did not know what she would talk to him about and what he would answer her. Nor was it woman in general that he feared in her: he knew little of women, of course, but still, all his life, from earliest infancy right up to the monastery, he had lived with no one but them. He was afraid of this particular woman, precisely of Katerina Ivanovna herself. He had been afraid of her from the very first time he saw her. And he had seen her only once or twice, three times perhaps, and had even once happened to exchange a few words with her. He remembered her image as that of a beautiful, proud, and imperious girl. But it was not her beauty that tormented him; it was something else. It was precisely the inexplicability of his fear that increased the fear in him now. This girl’s aims were most noble, he knew that; she was striving to save his brother Dmitri, who was already guilty before her, and striving out of sheer magnanimity. And yet, in spite of his awareness, and in spite of the justice that he could not help rendering to all these fine and magnanimous feelings, a chill ran down his spine the nearer he came to her house.

He reckoned that he would not find his brother Ivan Fyodorovich, who was so close to her, at her house: brother Ivan was surely with their father now. Dmitri he was still more certain not to find, and he had a presentiment why. So their conversation would take place in private. He would very much have liked to see brother Dmitri before this fateful conversation and to run in on him. Without showing him the letter, he might have exchanged a word or two with him about something. But brother Dmitri lived far away and was surely not at home now either. After standing still for a minute, he finally made up his mind. Crossing himself with a habitual, hasty sign of the cross and at once smiling at something, he set off resolutely toward his terrible lady.

He knew her house. But if he had to go by way of the High Street, then across the square, and so on, it would be a fair distance. Our little town is extremely spread out, and the distances in it are sometimes quite large. Besides, his father was waiting for him, perhaps had not yet had time to forget his order, and might turn capricious, and so he had to hurry to get to both places in time. As a result of all these considerations he decided to shorten the way by going by the back ways, and he knew all these passages in the little town like the back of his hand. By the back ways meant almost without roads, along deserted fences, sometimes even climbing over other people’s wattle fences and passing through other people’s yards, where, however, everyone knew him and everyone greeted him. In this way he could come out onto the High Street by half the distance. At one point he even had to pass very close to his father’s house, namely past the garden next to his father’s, which belonged to a decrepit little crooked house with four windows. The owner of this little house, as Alyosha knew, was a townswoman, a legless old woman who lived with her daughter, a former civilized lady’s maid in the capital, who until recently had kept going from one general’s household to another, and now for about a year, because of the old woman’s illness, had come home and was showing off in chic dresses. This old woman and her daughter had fallen, however, into terrible poverty, and even went every day to Fyodor Pavlovich’s kitchen next door for soup and bread. Marfa Ignatyevna was glad to ladle some out for them. But the daughter, though she came for soup, had not sold a single one of her dresses, and one of them even had a very long train. Alyosha had learned of this last circumstance, quite by chance of course, from his friend Rakitin, who knew absolutely everything in their little town, and, having learned it, he had naturally forgotten it at once. But now, coming level with the neighbor’s garden, he suddenly remembered precisely that train, quickly raised his bowed and pensive head, and… suddenly ran into a most unexpected encounter.

Behind the wattle fence in the neighbor’s garden, perched up on something, his brother Dmitri Fyodorovich was standing, leaning out as far as his chest, and with all his might making signs to him with his hands, calling him and beckoning to him, evidently afraid not only to shout but even to say a word aloud, lest he be heard. Alyosha at once ran up to the fence.

“A good thing you looked up yourself, or I’d almost have shouted to you,” Dmitri Fyodorovich whispered to him joyfully and hurriedly. “Climb in here! Quick! Ah, how splendid that you’ve come. I was just thinking about you…”

Alyosha was glad himself, and was only puzzled how to climb over the fence. But “Mitya” caught his elbow with a giant’s hand and helped him jump. Gathering up his cassock, Alyosha jumped over with the agility of a barefoot town urchin.

“Well done, and now come on!” broke from Mitya in a rapturous whisper.

“Where to?” Alyosha whispered too, looking around on all sides and finding himself in a completely empty garden, in which there was no one but the two of them. The garden was small, but the owner’s little house was nevertheless no less than fifty paces from them. “But there’s no one here; why are you whispering?”

“Why am I whispering? Ah, devil take it,” Dmitri Fyodorovich suddenly cried at the top of his voice, “why am I whispering? Well, you see for yourself how a muddle of nature can suddenly come about. I’m here in secret, guarding a secret. Explanations later, but knowing that it’s a secret, I suddenly began to speak secretly too, and I’m whispering like a fool when there’s no need. Come on! Over there! Until then, keep quiet. I want to kiss you!

“Glory to the Highest in the world,
Glory to the Highest in me!…

“I was just repeating that, sitting here, before you came…”

The garden was the size of a desyatina or a little more, but it was planted with trees only around the edge, along all four fences—apple trees, a maple, a linden, a birch. The middle of the garden was empty, given over to a meadow, from which several poods of hay were mown in summer. The owner let the garden out from spring on for a few rubles. There were also beds of raspberries, gooseberries, and currants, again all along the fences, and vegetable beds close to the house itself, started only recently, however. Dmitri Fyodorovich led his guest to the corner of the garden farthest from the house. There, suddenly, among thickly growing lindens and old bushes of currant and elder, guelder rose and lilac, there appeared something like the ruins of a very ancient green summerhouse, blackened and lopsided, with latticed walls but a roof overhead, in which one could still shelter from the rain. The summerhouse had been built God knows when, fifty years ago by tradition, by a certain owner of the little house in those days, Alexander Karlovich von Schmidt, a retired lieutenant colonel. But everything had already decayed, the floor had rotted, all the floorboards were loose, and the wood smelled of damp. In the summerhouse stood a green wooden table, sunk into the ground, and around it ran benches, also green, on which one could still sit. Alyosha had noticed his brother’s rapturous state at once, but, entering the summerhouse, he saw on the little table half a bottle of cognac and a little glass.

“That’s cognac!” Mitya roared with laughter. “And you’re already looking: ‘drinking again’? Don’t believe the phantom.

“Do not believe the hollow, lying crowd,
Forget your doubts…

“I’m not drinking, I’m only ‘treating myself,’ as that swine of yours Rakitin says, who will become a state councilor and will go on saying ‘treating myself.’ Sit down. I’d take you, Alyoshka, and press you to my breast, so hard as to crush you, for in the whole world… truly… tru-ly… (take it in! take it in!) I love only you alone!”

He uttered the last line in a sort of near frenzy.

“Only you, and one ‘low creature’ besides, whom I’ve fallen in love with, and that’s been the ruin of me. But to fall in love is not to love. One can fall in love even while hating. Remember that! Now, while I’m cheerful, I’ll say it! Sit down here at the table, and I’ll sit beside you, to the side, and I’ll look at you and keep talking. You’ll keep silent, and I’ll keep talking, because the time has come. But, you know, I’ve decided that we really must speak quietly, because here… here… the most unexpected ears may turn up. I’ll explain everything; as they say, to be continued. Why was I so eager to see you, why was I thirsting for you just now, all these days, and now? (I’ve been anchored here five days already.) All these days? Because I’ll tell everything to you alone, because I must, because you are needed, because tomorrow I fall from the clouds, because tomorrow life ends and begins. Have you ever felt, have you ever dreamed of falling from a mountain into a pit? Well, now I’m falling, and it’s no dream. And I’m not afraid, and you mustn’t be afraid either. That is, I am afraid, but it’s sweet to me. That is, not sweet, but rapture… Well, the devil with it, it doesn’t matter, whatever happens. A strong spirit, a weak spirit, a woman’s spirit—whatever happens! Let us praise nature: look how much sun there is, what a clear sky, every leaf still green, it’s full summer yet, four o’clock in the afternoon, the stillness! Where were you going?”

“I was going to Father’s, but first I wanted to call on Katerina Ivanovna.”

“To her and to Father! Whew! What a coincidence! Why, what did I call you for, what did I want you for, what did I hunger and thirst for you for with every winding of my soul and even with my ribs? To send you to Father, precisely, from me, and then to her, to Katerina Ivanovna, and so to have done both with her and with Father. To send an angel. I could have sent anyone, but I needed to send an angel. And here you are, going to her and to Father yourself.”

“Did you really want to send me?” broke from Alyosha, with a pained expression on his face.

“Wait, you knew it. And I see that you understood everything at once. But be quiet, be quiet for now. Don’t pity me and don’t cry!”

Dmitri Fyodorovich stood up, became thoughtful, and put a finger to his forehead:

“She called you herself, she wrote you a letter, or something, that’s why you were going to her; otherwise would you have gone?”

“Here is the note,” Alyosha said, taking it out of his pocket. Mitya ran through it quickly.

“And you came by the back ways! O gods! I thank you for sending him by the back ways so that he fell into my hands, like the golden fish to the old fool of a fisherman in the tale. Listen, Alyosha, listen, brother. Now I intend to tell everything. For I must tell someone at least. I’ve already told an angel in heaven, but I must tell an angel on earth too. You are an angel on earth. You will hear me out, you will judge, and you will forgive… And that is just what I need, for someone higher to forgive me. Listen: if two beings suddenly break away from everything earthly and fly off into the extraordinary, or at least one of them does, and before that, flying away or perishing, comes to the other and says: do this and that for me, something one never asks of anyone, but which one may ask only on one’s deathbed—then surely the other will do it… if he’s a friend, if he’s a brother?”

“I will do it, but tell me what it is, and tell me quickly,” said Alyosha.

“Quickly… Hm. Don’t hurry, Alyosha: you’re hurrying and fretting. There’s no need to rush now. Now the world has come out onto a new street. Ah, Alyosha, what a pity you’ve never thought your way up to rapture! But then, what am I telling him? As if you, of all people, hadn’t thought your way up to it! What am I saying, blockhead that I am:

“Be noble, man!

“Whose line is that?”

Alyosha decided to wait. He understood that all his business really was, perhaps, only here now. Mitya fell into thought for a moment, leaning his elbow on the table and resting his head on his palm. Both were silent.

“Lyosha,” said Mitya, “you’re the only one who won’t laugh! I’d like to open… my confession… with Schiller’s hymn to joy. An die Freude! But I don’t know German, I only know that it’s an die Freude. And don’t think I’m babbling because I’m drunk. I’m not drunk at all. Cognac is cognac, but I need two bottles to get drunk—

“And Silenus, ruddy-faced,
On his stumbling ass—

“and I haven’t drunk even a quarter of a bottle, and I’m no Silenus. Not Silenus, but steel-in-us, because I’ve made a decision forever. Forgive me the pun; you’ll have to forgive me a great deal today, not just a pun. Don’t worry, I’m not spinning it out, I’m talking business and I’ll come to the point in a moment. I won’t drag it out. Wait, how does it go…”

He raised his head, thought for a moment, and suddenly began rapturously:

“Timid, naked, wild, there hid
The Troglodyte in caves of rock,
The nomad wandered through the fields
And laid the fields to waste.
The hunter with his spear and arrows
Roamed the forests, terrible…
Woe to those the waves have flung
Upon unsheltering shores!
From the Olympian summit
Mother Ceres descends in search
Of her stolen Proserpina:
Wild the world lies before her.
Neither shelter nor a welcome
Anywhere for the goddess there;
And nowhere does a temple
Bear witness to the gods’ worship.
The fruit of fields, the sweet grape-clusters
Do not shine at any feasts;
Only remnants of bodies smoke
On the bloodstained altars.
And wherever with sad eye
Ceres turns her gaze there,
In deep humiliation
Everywhere she sees man!”

Sobs suddenly broke from Mitya’s breast. He seized Alyosha by the hand.

“My friend, my friend, in humiliation, in humiliation still, even now. A man has a terrible lot to endure on earth, a terrible lot of misfortunes! Don’t think I’m nothing but a boor with an officer’s rank who drinks cognac and leads a debauched life. I think of hardly anything but this, brother, of this humiliated man, if only I’m not lying. God grant I don’t lie now and don’t praise myself. I think of this man because I’m such a man myself.

“That man may rise in his soul
Out of his baseness,
With the ancient mother earth
Let him make a union forever.

“But here’s the thing: how am I to make a union with the earth forever? I don’t kiss the earth, I don’t cut open her breast; am I to become a peasant or a shepherd boy, then? I go on and I don’t know: have I landed in stench and shame, or in light and joy? That’s where the trouble is, for everything in the world is a riddle! And whenever I happened to sink into the very, very deepest shame of debauchery (and that’s all that ever happened to me), I always read that poem about Ceres and about man. Did it reform me? Never! Because I’m a Karamazov. Because if I’m going to fly into the abyss, I’ll go straight down, head first and heels in the air, and I’m even pleased to be falling in just such a humiliating position, and I consider it beauty for myself. And in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn. Let me be cursed, let me be low and vile, but let me too kiss the hem of that robe in which my God is clothed; let me be following the devil at the same time, but I am still your son too, Lord, and I love you, and I feel the joy without which the world cannot stand and be.

“Eternal joy gives drink
To the soul of God’s creation,
By the secret power of ferment
She sets the cup of life aflame;
She coaxed the blade of grass to light,
Unfolded chaos into suns,
And poured them through the spaces
Beyond the stargazer’s rule.
At the breast of kindly nature
All that breathes drinks joy;
All creatures and all peoples
She draws along behind her;
She gave us friends in misfortune,
The juice of grapes, the Graces’ garlands,
To insects—sensuality…
The angel—stands before God.

“But enough of verses! I’ve shed tears, so let me weep. Let it be foolishness that everyone will laugh at, but not you. There, your little eyes are shining too. Enough of verses. I want to tell you now about the ‘insects,’ about those whom God endowed with sensuality:

“To insects—sensuality!

“I, brother, am that very insect, and it was said specially about me. And all of us Karamazovs are the same, and in you, an angel, that insect lives too and raises storms in your blood. Storms, because sensuality is a storm, more than a storm! Beauty is a terrible and an awful thing! Terrible because it is undefinable, and it cannot be defined because God has set nothing but riddles. Here the shores meet, here all contradictions live together. I’m very uneducated, brother, but I’ve thought a lot about this. A terrible lot of mysteries! Too many riddles weigh down a man on earth. Solve them as best you can and come out of the water dry. Beauty! What I can’t bear, besides, is that some man, even one higher in heart and with a lofty mind, starts out from the ideal of the Madonna and finishes with the ideal of Sodom. More terrible still is the man who, with the ideal of Sodom already in his soul, still does not renounce the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart burns with it, and truly, truly burns, as in his young, unblemished years. No, man is broad, even too broad; I’d narrow him. Devil knows what it even is, that’s what! What seems shame to the mind is nothing but beauty to the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, it is in Sodom that it sits for the vast majority of people—did you know that secret or not? The awful thing is that beauty is not only a terrible but also a mysterious thing. Here the devil is fighting with God, and the battlefield is the hearts of men. But then, everyone talks about what hurts him. Listen, now to the business itself.”