II. From the Life of the Hieroschemamonk the Elder Zosima, Departed in God, Compiled from His Own Words by Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov

Biographical Information

(a) About the Elder Zosima’s Young Brother

Beloved fathers and teachers, I was born in a distant northern province, in the town of V., to a father who was of the nobility, but not of a distinguished family and of no very high rank. He died when I was only two years old, and I do not remember him at all. He left my mother a small wooden house and some capital, not great, but enough to live on with her children without want. There were only two of us children: I, Zinovy, and my elder brother, Markel. He was about eight years older than I, of a hot-tempered and irritable character, but kind, not given to mockery, and strangely silent, especially at home, with me, with our mother, and with the servants. He did well at the gymnasium but did not make friends with his schoolfellows, though he did not quarrel with them either; so at least our mother remembered him. Half a year before his death, when he was already past seventeen, he took to visiting a certain man in our town who lived in solitude, a political exile of sorts, sent away from Moscow to our town for freethinking. This exile was no small scholar and a distinguished philosopher at the university. For some reason he took a liking to Markel and began to receive him. The youth would sit with him whole evenings, and so it went all winter, until the exile was summoned back to government service in Petersburg, at his own request, for he had patrons. Lent began, and Markel would not keep the fast; he cursed and laughed at it: “It’s all nonsense,” he said, “and there is no God at all,” so that he horrified our mother and the servants, and me too, little as I was, for although I was only nine, when I heard these words I too was very frightened. Our servants were all serfs, four of them, all bought in the name of a landowner we knew. I remember, too, how our mother sold one of these four, the cook Afimya, lame and elderly, for sixty rubles in paper money, and hired a free woman in her place. And then in the sixth week of Lent my brother suddenly grew worse; he had always been sickly, weak in the chest, of a frail constitution and inclined to consumption; he was quite tall, but thin and puny, and very fine of face. Perhaps he caught cold, but the doctor came and soon whispered to our mother that it was galloping consumption and that he would not live through the spring. Our mother began to weep, and began to ask my brother, cautiously (more so as not to frighten him), to fast and take communion of the holy mysteries of God, for he was still on his feet then. When he heard this he grew angry and cursed the church of God, yet he became thoughtful: he guessed at once that he was dangerously ill and that this was why his mother was sending him, while he still had the strength, to fast and take communion. However, he himself already knew that he had long been unwell, and a year before that he had once said coolly at table to me and our mother: “I am not long for this world among you; perhaps I won’t live another year,” and it was as though he had foretold it. Three days or so went by, and Holy Week came. And from Tuesday morning my brother began to fast and go to the services. “I am really doing this for you, Mother, to make you glad and set your mind at ease,” he said to her. Our mother wept for joy, and from grief as well: “His end must be near, if such a change has come over him all at once.” But he did not go to church for long; he took to his bed, so that they heard his confession and gave him communion at home. Bright, clear, fragrant days came; Easter was late that year. All night long, I remember, he would cough and sleep badly, and in the morning he would always dress and try to sit in the soft armchair. That is how I shall always remember him: he sits there quiet and meek, smiling, ill as he is, but his face cheerful and joyful. He was changed altogether in his soul, such a wonderful change had suddenly begun in him! The old nurse would come into his room: “Let me light the lamp before the icon in your room too, my dear.” Before, he would not allow it, he even used to blow it out. “Light it, dear, light it, I was a monster to forbid you before. You pray to God as you light the lamp, and I pray as I rejoice over you. So we are praying to the one God.” These words seemed strange to us, and our mother would go off to her room and weep and weep, and only when she went in to him would she wipe her eyes and put on a cheerful look. “Mother, don’t cry, my dear,” he would say, “I have a long time yet to live, a long time to make merry with you, and life, life is merry, joyful!” “Ah, my dear, what merriment is there for you, when you burn with fever all night and cough so that your chest is nearly torn apart?” “Mama,” he answered her, “don’t cry, life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we do not want to know it, and if we wanted to know it, tomorrow there would be paradise all over the world.” And everyone wondered at his words, he said it so strangely and so decidedly; they were moved and wept. Acquaintances came to see us: “My dear ones,” he would say, “my precious ones, and what have I done to deserve your love, why do you love such a one as me, and how is it I did not know it before, did not value it?” To the servants who came in he kept saying: “My dear ones, my precious ones, why do you serve me, and am I even worth being served? If God had mercy and left me alive, I would serve you myself, for all of us must serve one another.” Our mother, listening, would shake her head: “My precious one, it’s your illness that makes you talk this way.” “Mama, my joy,” he said, “there cannot help but be masters and servants, but let me too be the servant of my servants, the same as they are to me. And I will tell you this too, Mother: each of us is guilty before everyone in everything, and I more than all.” Our mother even smiled at that, weeping and smiling: “Well, and how is it,” she said, “that you are guilty before everyone, more than all? There are murderers, robbers, and what sins have you had time to commit, that you accuse yourself more than all?” “Mother, my own lifeblood,” he said (he had begun to use such fond, unexpected words then), “my dear lifeblood, my joy, know that truly each of us is guilty before everyone, for everyone and for everything. I do not know how to explain it to you, but I feel that it is so, to the point of torment. And how is it we lived, and were angry, and knew nothing then?” So he would rise from sleep, every day more and more touched and joyful and all trembling with love. The doctor would come, an old German, Eisenschmidt, used to come: “Well, Doctor, shall I live another little day in this world?” he would joke with him. “Not just a day, you will live many days,” the doctor would answer, “and months and years too.” “But what are years, what are months!” he would exclaim. “Why count the days, even one day is enough for a man to know all happiness. My dear ones, why do we quarrel, boast before one another, remember each other’s offenses? Let us go straight out into the garden and walk and frolic, and love and praise one another, and kiss, and bless our life.” “He is not long for this world, your son,” the doctor said to our mother when she saw him out to the porch. “The illness is making him lose his mind.” The windows of his room looked out on the garden, and our garden was a shady one, with old trees; the spring buds had swelled on the trees, the early birds had come, chattering and singing to him at the windows. And all at once, looking at them and admiring them, he began to ask their forgiveness too: “Birds of God, joyful birds, forgive me too, for I have sinned against you as well.” None of us at home could understand this at all then, and he was weeping with joy: “Yes,” he said, “there was such glory of God all around me: the birds, the trees, the meadows, the skies, and I alone lived in disgrace, I alone dishonored everything, and never noticed the beauty and the glory at all.” “You are taking too many sins upon yourself,” our mother would say, weeping. “Mother, my joy, I am weeping from gladness, not from grief; I want to be guilty before them myself, only I cannot explain it to you, for I do not know how to love them. Let me be a sinner before everyone, but then everyone will forgive me too, and that is paradise. Am I not in paradise now?”

And there was much more that I cannot remember or write down. I remember once going in to him alone, when there was no one with him. It was an evening hour, clear; the sun was setting and lit up the whole room with a slanting ray. Seeing me, he beckoned to me; I went up to him, he took me by the shoulders with both hands and looked into my face tenderly, lovingly; he said nothing, only looked at me like that for a minute or so: “Well,” he said, “run along now, play, live for me!” I went out then and went to play. And later in life I recalled many times, with tears now, how he bade me live for him. He said many more such wonderful and beautiful words, though we did not understand them then. He died in the third week after Easter, fully conscious, and although he had stopped speaking, he did not change until his very last hour: he looked about joyfully, gladness in his eyes, seeking us with his glances, smiling at us, calling us. Even in the town there was much talk of his death. All this shook me then, but not too much, though I wept a great deal when they buried him. I was young, a child, but everything remained in my heart indelibly, the feeling lay hidden. In its own time it all had to rise up and respond. And so it happened.

(b) About Holy Scripture in the Life of Father Zosima

My mother and I were left alone then. Soon kind acquaintances advised her: here you have only one son left, they said, and you are not poor, you have capital, so why not follow the example of others and send your son to Petersburg? If he stays here, you may be depriving him of a distinguished career. And they put it into my mother’s head to take me to Petersburg, to the Cadet Corps, so that I might afterward enter the Imperial Guard. My mother hesitated a long time: how could she part with her last son? But she made up her mind all the same, though not without many tears, thinking to further my happiness. She took me to Petersburg and placed me there, and from that time I never saw her again; for three years later she herself died, having grieved and trembled for us both all those three years. From my parents’ house I brought away only precious memories, for there are no memories more precious to a man than those of his earliest childhood in his parents’ house, and this is almost always so, if there is even a little love and harmony in the family. And even from the very worst family precious memories may be kept, if only your own soul is capable of seeking what is precious. Among my memories of home I count also my memories of sacred history, which, though only a child, I was very eager to know in my parents’ house. I had a book then, a sacred history with beautiful pictures, called A Hundred and Four Sacred Stories from the Old and New Testaments, and from it I learned to read. It lies here on my shelf even now; I keep it as a precious remembrance. But even before I learned to read, I remember how a certain spiritual insight first visited me, when I was only eight years old. My mother took me alone (I do not remember where my brother was then) to the Lord’s church on the Monday of Holy Week, to the liturgy. It was a clear day, and as I remember it now I seem to see again how the incense rose from the censer and slowly went upward, and from above, in the dome, through a narrow little window, God’s rays poured down upon us in the church, and the incense, rising to them in waves, seemed to melt into them. I watched with tender emotion, and for the first time in my life I received into my soul, consciously, the first seed of the word of God. A youth came out into the middle of the church with a big book, so big that it seemed to me then he could hardly even carry it, and he laid it on the lectern, opened it, and began to read, and suddenly then for the first time I understood something; for the first time in my life I understood what is read in the church of God. There was a man in the land of Uz, upright and God-fearing, and he had such-and-such riches, so many camels, so many sheep and asses, and his children made merry, and he loved them very much and prayed to God for them: perhaps they had sinned in their merrymaking. And now the devil goes up to God together with the sons of God and says to the Lord that he has gone all over the earth and under the earth. “And have you seen my servant Job?” God asks him. And God boasted to the devil, pointing to his great and holy servant. And the devil smiled at God’s words: “Give him over to me, and you will see that your servant will murmur and curse your name.” And God gave his righteous one, whom he loved so much, over to the devil, and the devil struck his children and his cattle and scattered his riches, all at once, as though by God’s thunder, and Job tore his clothes and threw himself on the ground and cried out: “Naked I came out of my mother’s womb, and naked I shall return to the earth; God gave, and God has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord from now and forever!” Fathers and teachers, bear with my tears now, for all my childhood seems to rise up again before me, and I breathe now as I breathed then with my little eight-year-old child’s breast, and I feel, as I did then, wonder and confusion and joy. And the camels so took hold of my imagination then, and Satan, who talks like that with God, and God, who gave up his servant to ruin, and his servant crying out: “Blessed be your name, although you punish me,” and then the quiet, sweet singing in the church: “Let my prayer rise up like incense,” and again the incense from the priest’s censer, and the prayer on bended knees! Ever since then (I took it up only yesterday) I cannot read this most holy story without tears. And how much there is in it that is great, mysterious, beyond imagining! Afterward I heard the words of mockers and blasphemers, proud words: how could the Lord give up the most beloved of his saints to the devil for sport, take his children from him, strike him himself with sickness and sores, so that he scraped the pus from his wounds with a potsherd, and what for? Only to boast before Satan: “See what my saint can endure for my sake!” But that is the greatness of it, that there is a mystery here, that the passing earthly face and eternal truth have touched each other here. In the face of earthly justice an act of eternal justice is accomplished. Here the Creator, just as in the first days of creation, when he ended each day with praise, “What I have created is good,” looks on Job and again boasts of his creation. And Job, praising the Lord, serves not only him but will serve all his creation, from generation to generation and forever and ever, for to this he was destined. Lord, what a book it is, and what lessons! What a book is this holy scripture, what a miracle and what a power are given to man with it! Like a sculpture of the world and of man and of human characters, and everything is named and shown forth forever and ever. And how many mysteries resolved and revealed: God restores Job again, gives him riches again, many years go by again, and now he has new children, different ones, and he loves them. Lord! “But how could he, it would seem, love these new ones, when those former ones are no more, when he has lost them? Remembering those, can he be fully happy, as before, with the new ones, however dear the new ones may be to him?” But he can, he can: by the great mystery of human life the old grief passes little by little into a quiet, tender joy; in place of young, seething blood comes a meek, serene old age: I bless the rising of the sun each day, and my heart sings to it as before, but now I love its setting more, its long slanting rays, and with them quiet, meek, tender memories, dear images from all my long and blessed life, and over all of it the justice of God, moving the heart, reconciling, forgiving all! My life is ending, I know it and hear it, but I feel, with every day that is left to me, how my earthly life already touches a new, infinite, unknown, but swiftly approaching life, at the foretaste of which my soul trembles with rapture, my mind shines, and my heart weeps for joy… Friends and teachers, I have heard more than once, and now of late it is heard more loudly still, how our priests of God, and above all the village priests, complain tearfully and everywhere of their meager income and their humiliation, and declare outright, even in print (I have read it myself), that they can no longer, it seems, interpret the scriptures to the people, for their income is meager, and if Lutherans and heretics now come and begin to lure away the flock, then let them lure it away, for our income, they say, is meager. Lord! I think, God grant them more of this income that is so precious to them (for their complaint too is just), but truly I say: if anyone is to blame for this, half the blame is ours! For granted that he has no time, granted that he says rightly that he is weighed down all the time by work and by the services he must perform, still it is not all the time; surely he has at least one hour in the whole week to remember God as well. And besides, the work does not go on the whole year round. Let him gather at his house once a week, in the evening hour, only the children at first; the fathers will hear of it, and the fathers too will begin to come. And there is no need to build mansions for this work; simply take them into your cottage; do not be afraid, they will not foul your cottage, you are gathering them for only one hour. Let him open this book to them and begin to read, without learned words and without conceit, without lording it over them, but tenderly and meekly, rejoicing himself that he is reading to them and that they are listening to him and understanding him, loving these words himself; only now and then let him stop and explain some word a simple man would not understand; do not worry, they will understand everything, the Orthodox heart will understand it all! Read to them about Abraham and Sarah, about Isaac and Rebecca, about how Jacob went to Laban and wrestled in a dream with the Lord and said: “How fearful is this place,” and you will strike the pious mind of the simple man. Read to them, and especially to the children, about how the brothers sold their own brother into slavery, the dear boy Joseph, the dreamer and great prophet, and told their father that a wild beast had torn his son to pieces, showing him his bloodstained garment. Read how the brothers afterward came to Egypt for grain, and Joseph, by then a great courtier, unrecognized by them, tormented them, accused them, detained his brother Benjamin, and all the while loving them: “I love you, and loving you I torment you.” For all his life he had remembered unceasingly how they had sold him to merchants somewhere out there in the scorching steppe, by a well, and how he, wringing his hands, had wept and begged his brothers not to sell him as a slave into a foreign land, and now, seeing them after so many years, he loved them again beyond measure, but he harried and tormented them, all the while loving them. At last he goes away from them, unable himself to bear the torment of his heart, throws himself on his bed and weeps; then he wipes his face and comes out shining and radiant and announces to them: “Brothers, I am Joseph, your brother!” Let him read further about how the aged Jacob rejoiced on learning that his dear boy was still alive, and set out for Egypt, leaving even his homeland, and died in a foreign land, pronouncing forever and ever in his testament the greatest word, which had been mysteriously held all his life in his meek and timid heart, that from his line, from Judah, would come the great hope of the world, its reconciler and savior! Fathers and teachers, forgive me and do not be angry that like a little child I am speaking of what you have long known and could teach me yourselves a hundred times more skillfully and more fittingly. I say it only out of rapture, and forgive my tears, for I love this book! Let him weep too, the priest of God, and he will see that the hearts of those who listen to him will be shaken in answer. Only a little seed is needed, a tiny one: let him cast it into the soul of the simple man, and it will not die; it will live in his soul all his life, hidden in him amid the darkness, amid the stench of his sins, like a point of light, like a great reminder. And there is no need, no need to explain and teach much; he will understand everything simply. Do you think the simple man will not understand? Try reading to him next the touching and moving tale of the beautiful Esther and the haughty Vashti; or the wonderful story of the prophet Jonah in the belly of the whale. Do not forget, too, the Lord’s parables, chiefly from the Gospel of Luke (that is what I did), and then from the Acts of the Apostles the conversion of Saul (that without fail, without fail!), and finally from the Lives of the Saints, if only the life of Alexis, the Man of God, and of the greatest of the great, the joyful sufferer, the beholder of God and bearer of Christ, Mother Mary of Egypt, and you will pierce his heart with these simple tales, and all for only an hour a week, in spite of your meager income, just one little hour. And he will see for himself that our people are merciful and grateful and will repay him a hundredfold; remembering the priest’s zeal and his tender words, they will help him in his field of their own will, they will help him in his house too, and they will repay him with more respect than before, and there his income will have grown already. The thing is so simple-hearted that sometimes we are even afraid to say it aloud, for they will laugh at you for it, and yet how true it is! He who does not believe in God will not believe in God’s people either. But he who has come to believe in God’s people will behold their holiness as well, even if he did not believe in it at all before. Only the people and their spiritual power to come will convert our atheists, who have torn themselves away from their native soil. And what is Christ’s word without an example? Without the word of God the people perish, for their soul thirsts for the word and for every beautiful thing it can receive. In my youth, long ago now, nearly forty years since, Father Anfim and I went all over Russia collecting alms for the monastery, and one night we stayed on the bank of a great navigable river, with some fishermen, and with us sat a comely youth, a peasant, eighteen or so to look at; he was hurrying to his place, to haul a merchant’s barge by towrope the next day. And I see him looking before him, tenderly and serenely. It was a bright, quiet, warm July night, the river broad, a mist rising from it, refreshing us, now and then a fish splashing softly, the birds had fallen silent, all was quiet, seemly, all was praying to God. And only the two of us were not asleep, I and this youth, and we fell to talking about the beauty of this world of God’s and about its great mystery. Every blade of grass, every little bug, the ant, the golden bee, all of them know their path to an amazing degree, without having reason; they bear witness to the mystery of God, they accomplish it ceaselessly themselves, and I saw that the dear youth’s heart was kindled. He told me that he loved the forest, the forest birds; he was a bird catcher, he understood every whistle of theirs, he knew how to lure every bird; I know nothing better than being in the forest, he said, though everything is good. “Truly,” I answered him, “everything is good and glorious, because everything is truth. Look,” I said to him, “at the horse, a great animal that stands close to man, or at the ox, that feeds him and labors for him, downcast and pensive; look at their faces: what meekness, what attachment to man, who often beats him mercilessly, what gentleness, what trustfulness, and what beauty in his face. It is touching even to know that there is no sin on him, for everything is perfect, everything except man is sinless, and Christ is with them even before us.” “Can it really be,” the youth asks, “that Christ is with them too?” “How could it be otherwise,” I said to him, “for the Word is for all; all creation and every creature, every little leaf strives toward the Word, sings glory to God, weeps to Christ, unknown to itself, accomplishes this by the mystery of its sinless life. Over there,” I said to him, “in the forest roams the fearsome bear, terrible and fierce, and guilty of nothing in it.” And I told him how a bear once came to a great saint who was working out his salvation in the forest, in a little cell, and the great saint was moved with tenderness over him, went out to him fearlessly, and gave him a piece of bread: “Go your way,” he said, “Christ be with you,” and the fierce beast went away obediently and meekly, without doing any harm. And the youth was moved that it had gone away without doing harm, and that Christ was with it too. “Ah,” he said, “how good that is, how good and wonderful everything of God’s is!” He sat there lost in thought, quietly and sweetly. I saw that he understood. And he fell asleep beside me in a light, sinless sleep. Lord, bless youth! And I prayed for him myself, before I went to sleep. Lord, send peace and light to your people!

(c) Memories of the Elder Zosima’s Youth and Young Manhood, Still in the World. The Duel

In Petersburg, in the Cadet Corps, I stayed a long time, almost eight years, and with my new education I stifled many of my childhood impressions, though I forgot none of them. In their place I took on so many new habits and even opinions that I turned into a creature almost savage, cruel, and absurd. I acquired a polish of courtesy and worldly manners together with the French language, and the soldiers who served us in the Corps we all regarded as utter brutes, and I did too. I more than anyone, perhaps, for of all my comrades I was the most impressionable in everything. When we came out as officers, we were ready to shed our blood for the insulted honor of our regiment, but as for true honor, almost none of us even knew what it is, and had he come to know it, he would have been the very first to ridicule it at once. We were almost proud of drunkenness, debauchery, and swagger. I will not say that we were wicked; all these young men were good, but they behaved wickedly, and I most of all. The main thing was that I had come into my own capital, and so I threw myself into living for my own pleasure, with all the impetuousness of youth, without restraint; I sailed off under full canvas. But here is the wonderful thing: I read books then too, and even with great pleasure; the Bible alone I almost never opened at that time, yet I never parted with it either, but carried it everywhere with me: truly I was keeping that book, without knowing it myself, “for the day and the hour, for the month and the year.” After serving in this way for some four years, I found myself at last in the town of K., where our regiment was stationed then. The society of the town was varied, numerous, and gay, hospitable and rich, and I was well received everywhere, for I was cheerful by nature, and besides I was reputed to be not poor, which in society counts for a good deal. And then a certain circumstance occurred that was the beginning of everything. I became attached to a young and beautiful girl, intelligent and worthy, of a bright, noble character, the daughter of respected parents. They were people of no small standing, with wealth, influence, and power, and they received me kindly and cordially. And it seemed to me that the girl was disposed toward me in her heart, and my heart was kindled by such a dream. Afterward I myself perceived and fully understood that perhaps I had not loved her with such force at all, but only honored her mind and her lofty character, as I could not fail to do. Selfishness, however, kept me from offering her my hand at that time: it seemed hard and frightening, at so young an age, and with money besides, to part with the temptations of a dissolute, free bachelor’s life. I did, however, drop hints. In any case, I put off every decisive step for a short while. And just then I happened to be sent off on duty to another district for two months. I come back after two months and suddenly learn that the girl is already married, to a rich landowner from near the town, a man older than I in years but still young, with connections in the capital and in the best society, which I did not have, a very amiable man and educated besides, and education was a thing I did not have at all. I was so struck by this unexpected event that my very mind was clouded. The main thing was that, as I learned at the time, this young landowner had been her betrothed for a long while, and I myself had met him many times in their house but had noticed nothing, blinded by my own merits. And it was this above all that offended me: how was it that almost everyone knew, and I alone knew nothing? And suddenly I felt an unbearable spite. With a flush in my face I began to remember how many times I had almost declared my love to her, and since she had not stopped me or warned me, it followed, I concluded, that she had been laughing at me. Afterward, of course, I realized and recalled that she had not been laughing at all; on the contrary, she herself would break off such conversations jokingly and begin others in their place; but at the time I could not see this and burned for revenge. I recall with surprise that this revenge and my anger were extremely burdensome and repugnant to me myself, for, having an easy character, I could not stay angry with anyone for long, and so I as it were fanned the flame in myself artificially and became at last outrageous and absurd. I bided my time, and once, in a large company, I managed suddenly to insult my “rival,” supposedly over a matter quite unconnected, by mocking an opinion of his about a certain event that was important at the time (it was in the year twenty-six), and I managed to mock it, people said, wittily and adroitly. Then I forced him to have it out with me, and in having it out I was so rude to him that he took up my challenge, despite the enormous difference between us, for I was younger than he, insignificant, and of low rank. Later I learned for certain that he had accepted my challenge as it were out of a jealous feeling toward me as well: he had been a little jealous of me before, over his wife, then still his bride; and now he thought that if she learned he had endured an insult from me and had not resolved to challenge me to a duel, she might involuntarily come to despise him and her love might waver. I soon found a second, a comrade, a lieutenant of our own regiment. In those days, although duels were cruelly prosecuted, there was even a sort of fashion for them among military men, so savage do prejudices sometimes grow and take root. It was the end of June, and our meeting was set for the next day, outside the town, at seven in the morning, and truly something as it were fateful happened to me then. Returning home in the evening, ferocious and outrageous, I grew angry with my orderly, Afanasy, and struck him twice in the face with all my strength, so that his face was bloodied. He had not been in my service long, and it had happened before that I struck him, but never with such bestial cruelty. And would you believe it, my dear ones, forty years have passed since then, and I still recall it with shame and torment. I went to bed, slept about three hours, and when I got up, the day was already beginning. I suddenly rose, I had no wish to sleep any longer; I went to the window and opened it (it gave onto the garden), and I see the sun rising, it is warm and beautiful, the birds have begun to ring out. What is it, I think, that I feel in my soul, something as it were shameful and base? Is it not because I am going to shed blood? No, I think, it does not seem to be that. Is it not because I am afraid of death, afraid of being killed? No, not that at all, not that at all… And suddenly, right then, I guessed what the matter was: it was that I had beaten Afanasy the evening before! Everything suddenly stood before me again, as though it were happening over again: he stands before me, and I strike him with a full swing right in the face, and he keeps his arms at his sides, his head erect, his eyes staring as if on parade, flinching at each blow and not even daring to raise his hands to shield himself; and this is what a man has been brought to, and this is a man beating a man! What a crime! It was as if a sharp needle had gone right through my soul. I stand there as if dazed, and the sun is shining, the little leaves are rejoicing, glittering, and the birds, the birds are praising God… I covered my face with both palms, fell onto the bed, and burst into sobs. And then I remembered my brother Markel and his words to the servants before his death: “My dear ones, my precious ones, why do you serve me, why do you love me, and am I even worth being served?” “Yes, am I worth it?” suddenly leapt into my head. Indeed, what am I worth, that another man, just like me, the image and likeness of God, should serve me? So this question pierced my mind for the first time in my life then. “Mother, my lifeblood, truly each of us is guilty before everyone, for everyone, only people do not know it, and if they knew it, there would be paradise at once!” “Lord, can it be that this too is untrue?” I weep and think. “Truly I, perhaps, am more guilty than all, for all, and worse than all the people in the world!” And suddenly the whole truth stood before me in all its light: what am I going to do? I am going to kill a man who is good, intelligent, noble, who has done me no wrong in anything, and thereby I will deprive his wife of happiness forever, torment her and kill her. I lay like that on the bed, face down, my face in the pillow, and did not even notice how the time went by. Suddenly my comrade the lieutenant comes in for me, with the pistols: “Ah,” he says, “good, you’re up already, it’s time, let’s go.” I began rushing about then, I was quite at a loss, but we went out all the same to get into the carriage: “Wait here a moment,” I say to him, “I’ll run back in a flash, I’ve forgotten my purse.” And I ran back alone into the apartment, straight to Afanasy’s little room: “Afanasy,” I say, “yesterday I struck you twice in the face, forgive me,” I say. He simply started, as if frightened, and stared, and I see that this is not enough, not enough, and suddenly, just as I was, in my epaulets, I flung myself down at his feet with my forehead to the ground: “Forgive me!” I say. At that he was utterly dumbfounded: “Your Honor, master, sir, how can you… am I even worth…” and suddenly he himself burst into tears, just as I had a little while before; he covered his face with both palms, turned to the window, and shook all over with sobbing, and I ran out to my comrade, flew into the carriage, “Drive on!” I shout. “Have you ever seen a conqueror?” I shout to him. “Here he is, before you!” There is such rapture in me, I laugh, I talk and talk all the way, I no longer remember what I said. He looks at me: “Well, brother, you’re a fine fellow, I can see you’ll uphold the uniform.” So we arrived at the place, and they were already there, waiting for us. They placed us twelve paces apart; his was the first shot; I stand before him cheerful, face to face, without blinking an eye, looking at him with love; I know what I will do. He fired, and it only grazed my cheek a tiny bit and nicked my ear. “Thank God,” I cry, “no man has been killed!” and I seized my own pistol, turned around, and flung it up into the trees: “That’s the place for you!” I cry. I turned to my adversary: “My dear sir,” I say, “forgive me, a foolish young man, for offending you through my own fault and now making you fire at me. I myself am ten times worse than you, and perhaps even more than that. Tell this to the person whom you honor above all in the world.” No sooner had I said this than all three of them began to shout: “Good heavens,” says my adversary, even getting angry, “if you did not want to fight, why did you trouble me?” “Yesterday,” I say to him, “I was still a fool, but today I have grown wiser,” I answer him cheerfully like that. “I believe you about yesterday,” he says, “but about today it is hard to agree with your opinion.” “Bravo,” I cry to him, and I clapped my hands, “I agree with you in that too, I have deserved it!” “Will you fire, my dear sir, or not?” “I will not,” I say, “but you, if you like, fire again, only it would be better for you not to fire.” The seconds are shouting too, especially mine: “How can you disgrace the regiment, begging forgiveness when you are standing at the barrier; if I had only known!” Then I stood before them all and I am no longer laughing: “Gentlemen,” I say, “is it really so astonishing in our day to meet a man who would himself repent of his foolishness and publicly confess his fault where he is at fault?” “But not at the barrier!” my second shouts again. “That is just it,” I answer them, “that is what is astonishing, for I ought to have confessed my fault as soon as we arrived here, even before his shot, and not have led him into a great and mortal sin, but we have arranged ourselves in the world so outrageously,” I say, “that to act so was almost impossible, for only after I had stood up to his shot at twelve paces could my words mean anything to them now, and if I had spoken before the shot, as soon as we arrived, they would simply have said: a coward, frightened of the pistol, and no use listening to him. Gentlemen,” I suddenly exclaimed from the bottom of my heart, “look about you at God’s gifts: the sky so clear, the air so pure, the grass so tender, and the birds, and all of nature, beautiful and sinless, and we, we alone, are godless and foolish and do not understand that life is paradise, for we have only to want to understand, and at once it will come in all its beauty, and we shall embrace and weep…” I wanted to go on, but I could not, my breath was even taken away, so sweetly, so youthfully, and in my heart there was such happiness as I had never felt in all my life. “All this is very sensible and pious,” my adversary says to me, “and in any case you are an original man.” “Laugh,” I laugh back at him, “and later you will praise me yourself.” “But I am ready to praise you now,” he says. “If you please, I will hold out my hand to you, for it seems you really are a sincere man.” “No,” I say, “not now, but later, when I have become better and deserve your respect, then hold it out, and you will do well.” We returned home; my second grumbled the whole way, and I kept kissing him. At once my comrades heard of it and gathered to judge me that same day: “He has soiled the uniform,” they said, “let him resign his commission.” Defenders turned up too: “He did stand up to the shot, all the same,” they said. “Yes, but he was afraid of the other shots and asked forgiveness at the barrier.” “But if he had been afraid of the shots,” the defenders objected, “he would have fired his own pistol first, before asking forgiveness, and he flung it into the woods still loaded; no, something else has happened here, something original.” I listen, looking at them cheerfully. “My dearest friends and comrades,” I say, “do not worry about my resigning my commission, because I have already done so, I have already sent in my resignation, today, at the office, this morning, and when I get my discharge I shall go straight into a monastery; that is why I am resigning.” As soon as I said this, every one of them burst out laughing: “Why didn’t you let us know from the start? Well, now everything is explained, a monk can’t be judged.” They laugh and cannot stop, and not mockingly at all, but kindly, merrily; all of them suddenly came to love me, even the fiercest of my accusers, and afterward, all that month, until my discharge came through, they all but carried me in their arms: “Ah, you monk,” they say. And everyone has a kind word for me; they set about talking me out of it, even pitying me: “What are you doing to yourself?” “No,” some said, “he’s a brave one, he stood up to the shot and could have fired his own pistol, only the night before he dreamed he was to go and be a monk, and that’s the reason.” Almost exactly the same thing happened in the society of the town. Before, they had not particularly noticed me, but only received me cordially, and now suddenly they all vied with one another to get to know me and invite me to their homes: they themselves laugh at me, and yet they love me. I will remark here that, although everyone was talking openly about our duel then, the authorities hushed up the affair, for my adversary was a close relative of our general, and since the matter had passed off without bloodshed, as if in jest, and since I had, after all, resigned my commission, they did indeed turn it into a jest. And then I began to speak aloud and without fear, in spite of their laughter, because the laughter, after all, was not spiteful but good-natured. All these conversations took place mostly in the evenings, in the company of ladies; the women came to like listening to me more then, and they made the men listen too. “But how can it be that I am guilty for everyone?” everyone laughs in my face. “Well, can I be guilty for you, for instance?” “But how,” I answer them, “could you even come to know it, when the whole world has long since taken another road and we take the downright lie for truth and demand the same lie from others? Here I have once in my life up and acted sincerely, and what then? I have become a sort of holy fool to all of you: though you have come to love me, still you laugh at me,” I say. “But how could anyone help loving such a man as you?” the hostess laughs aloud to me, and there was a large gathering at her house. Suddenly I look, and from among the ladies rises that very young woman over whom I had issued my challenge then, and whom only so recently I had been intending as my bride, and I had not even noticed that she had now arrived for the evening. She rose, came up to me, held out her hand: “Allow me,” she says, “to tell you that I am the first not to laugh at you, but, on the contrary, I thank you with tears and declare my respect for you for what you did then.” Then her husband too came up, and suddenly everyone began to crowd toward me, all but kissing me. I felt so joyful, but more than anyone else I suddenly noticed then a certain gentleman, a man already elderly, who was also coming up to me; though I had known him by name before, I had never been acquainted with him and until that evening had not even exchanged a word with him.

(d) The Mysterious Visitor

He had been in government service in our town for a long time already, and held a prominent post; he was a man respected by everyone, rich, renowned for his charity; he had donated a considerable capital to the almshouse and the orphanage, and besides that he did many good deeds secretly, without publicity, all of which came to light after his death. He was about fifty years old, and his look was almost stern; he was a man of few words; he had been married no more than ten years, to a wife who was still young, by whom he had three children, still small. And so the next evening I am sitting at home when suddenly my door opens and in walks this very gentleman.

I must remark that I was no longer living in my former lodgings then; as soon as I sent in my resignation, I moved to others and rented rooms from an old woman, the widow of an official, with her servant to wait on me, for the very reason I moved to these lodgings was that on the same day I returned from the duel I had sent Afanasy back to his company, because I was ashamed to look him in the eye after the way I had treated him that day; so inclined is the unprepared man of the world to be ashamed even of some most just deed of his own.

“I,” says the gentleman who had come in to me, “have been listening to you for several days now in various houses with great curiosity, and I have wished at last to become personally acquainted, so as to talk with you in still greater detail. Can you do me, my dear sir, so great a service?” “I can,” I say, “with the greatest pleasure, and I shall consider it a special honor,” I say this to him, but I myself am almost frightened, so struck was I by him from the very first then. For though people had listened to me and been curious about me, no one had yet come up to me with such a serious and stern inward look. And this one had even come to my lodgings himself. He sat down. “I see a great strength of character in you,” he goes on, “for you were not afraid to serve the truth in a matter in which you risked, for your truth, bearing the general contempt of everyone.” “Perhaps you praise me far too highly,” I say to him. “No, not too highly,” he answers me. “Believe me, to commit such an act is much harder than you think. That is really,” he goes on, “the one thing that struck me, and it is for this that I have come to you. Describe to me, if you will not disdain what is perhaps a most improper curiosity of mine, what precisely you felt at the moment when you decided at the duel to ask forgiveness, if only you remember it? Do not take my question for frivolity; on the contrary, in asking such a question I have a secret purpose of my own, which I shall probably explain to you later, if it pleases God to bring us closer still.”

All the while he was saying this, I looked him straight in the face, and suddenly I felt the strongest trust in him, and besides that an extraordinary curiosity on my part as well, for I sensed that he had some special secret of his own in his soul.

“You ask what precisely I felt at the moment when I asked my adversary’s forgiveness,” I answer him, “but I had better tell you from the very beginning what I have not yet told anyone else,” and I told him everything that had happened between me and Afanasy, and how I had bowed down to the ground before him. “From this you can see for yourself,” I concluded to him, “that at the duel itself it was already easier for me, for I had begun at home, and once I had set out on this road, everything further went not only without difficulty but even joyfully and gladly.”

He heard me out and looked at me so kindly: “All this,” he says, “is extraordinarily interesting; I shall come to you again and again.” And from then on he began to visit me almost every evening. And we would have become great friends, if he had talked to me about himself as well. But about himself he said almost not a word, and kept asking me about myself instead. In spite of this I came to love him very much and trusted him completely with all my feelings, for I thought: what do I need his secrets for? I can see even without them that he is a righteous man. Besides, he was so serious a man, and so far from my equal in years, and yet he came to me, a youth, and did not disdain me. And I learned much that was useful from him, for he was a man of lofty mind. “That life is paradise,” he says to me suddenly, “I have been thinking about that for a long time,” and suddenly he added: “That is all I think about.” He looks at me and smiles. “I am more convinced of it than you are,” he says. “Later you will learn why.” I listen to this and think to myself: “He surely wants to reveal something to me.” “Paradise,” he says, “lies hidden in each of us; here it is concealed in me too, now, and if I wish it, it will come for me in very truth tomorrow, and for the rest of my life.” I look: he is speaking with tender feeling and looking at me mysteriously, as though questioning me. “And as for every man being guilty for everyone and for everything, apart from his own sins,” he goes on, “you reasoned about that quite rightly, and it is astonishing how you could suddenly embrace this thought so fully. And it is truly so, that when people understand this thought, the kingdom of heaven will come for them, no longer in a dream but in very truth.” “But when,” I exclaimed to him then with sorrow, “will this come to pass, and will it ever come to pass? Is it not only a dream?” “There, now you do not believe,” he says. “You preach it, and you yourself do not believe. Know, then, that this dream, as you call it, will without doubt come to pass, believe that, but not now, for every action has its own law. It is a matter of the soul, a psychological matter. In order to remake the world anew, people themselves must turn psychologically onto another road. Until you have in very truth become a brother to everyone, brotherhood will not come. Never will people, by any science or by any advantage, be able to share out their property and their rights among themselves without offense. Everything will be too little for each, and they will all murmur, envy, and destroy one another. You ask when this will come to pass. It will come to pass, but first the period of human isolation must come to its end.” “What isolation is that?” I ask him. “Why, the kind that reigns everywhere now, and especially in our age, but it has not yet run its whole course, and its time has not yet come. For everyone now strives to set his own person apart as much as he can, wants to experience the fullness of life in himself alone, and meanwhile all his efforts lead not to the fullness of life but only to full self-destruction, for instead of the full definition of their being they fall into complete isolation. For in our age all have split up into units, each withdraws into his own burrow, each keeps away from the others, hides, and hides what he has, and ends by being repelled by people himself and repelling people from himself. He amasses wealth in isolation and thinks: how strong I am now, and how secure; and the madman does not know that the more he amasses, the deeper he sinks into a self-destroying impotence. For he has grown used to relying on himself alone and has split off from the whole as a unit; he has taught his soul not to believe in human help, in people and in mankind, and only trembles lest he lose his money and the rights he has acquired. Everywhere now the human mind is beginning, mockingly, not to understand that the true security of the person lies not in his own isolated effort but in the general wholeness of mankind. But it will surely come about that the time will come for this terrible isolation too to end, and all will understand at once how unnaturally they have separated themselves from one another. Such will be the spirit of the time, and they will be astonished that they sat so long in darkness and did not see the light. And then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven… But until then the banner must still be kept, and every now and then, even if only alone, a man must suddenly set an example and draw his soul out of isolation into a great deed of brotherly communion, even if it be in the guise of a holy fool. This is so that the great thought may not die…”

It was in such fiery and rapturous conversations that our evenings passed, one after another. I even gave up society and began to appear at people’s houses much more rarely, besides which the fashion for me was beginning to pass. I say this not in reproach, for they went on loving me and treating me cheerfully; but that fashion really is no small queen in society, this must be admitted all the same. My mysterious visitor I came at last to regard with admiration, for, besides delighting in his mind, I began to sense that he was nursing some design within himself and preparing for a great deed, perhaps. Perhaps he liked it, too, that I showed no outward curiosity about his secret and did not question him either directly or by hints. But I noticed at last that he himself seemed to be beginning to languish with the wish to reveal something to me. At least this had become very noticeable about a month after he began visiting me. “Do you know,” he asked me once, “that people in town are very curious about the two of us and wonder that I come to see you so often? But let them, for soon everything will be explained.” Sometimes an extraordinary agitation would suddenly come over him, and almost always in such cases he would get up and leave. And sometimes he would look at me for a long time, and piercingly, as it were, and I would think: “He is going to say something any moment now,” but he would suddenly break off and begin to talk about something familiar and ordinary. He also began to complain often of headaches. And then once, quite unexpectedly even, after he had been talking long and ardently, I see that he has suddenly turned pale, his face is all twisted, and he is staring right at me, point-blank.

“What is the matter with you?” I say. “Are you feeling unwell?”

He had, in fact, been complaining of a headache.

“I… do you know… I… killed a man.”

He said it and smiled, and he was white as chalk. “Why is he smiling?” the thought suddenly pierced my heart before I had grasped anything else. I myself turned pale.

“What are you saying?” I cry to him.

“You see,” he answers me, still with a pale smile, “how dearly it cost me to say the first word. Now I have said it, and it seems I have set out on the road. I shall go on.”

For a long time I did not believe him, and I did not believe him all at once, but only after he had come to me three days running and told me everything in detail. I took him for a madman, but ended by being convinced at last, plainly, with very great sorrow and astonishment. He had committed a great and terrible crime, fourteen years before, against a rich lady, young and beautiful, a widowed landowner who kept a house of her own in our town for her visits. Conceiving a great love for her, he declared his love to her and began urging her to marry him. But her heart already belonged to another, a distinguished military man of no low rank, who was away on campaign at the time and whom she was expecting back soon, however. She rejected his proposal and asked him not to call on her. Having stopped calling, he, knowing the layout of her house, made his way to her one night from the garden across the roof, with very great daring, at the risk of being discovered. But, as very often happens, crimes committed with extraordinary daring succeed more often than others. Entering the attic of the house through a dormer window, he went down into the living rooms by the little attic staircase, knowing that the door at the bottom of the staircase was not always locked, through the carelessness of the servants. He counted on this negligence this time too, and found it just so. Having made his way into the living quarters, he went in the dark into her bedroom, where an icon lamp was burning. And, as if on purpose, both her maids had slipped out quietly without leave, to a name-day party in the neighborhood, on the same street. The rest of the servants, men and women, were asleep in the servants’ quarters and in the kitchen, on the ground floor. At the sight of her sleeping, passion flared up in him, and then a vengeful, jealous fury seized his heart, and, beside himself, as if drunk, he went up and plunged a knife straight into her heart, so that she did not even cry out. Then, with a hellish and most criminal calculation, he arranged things so that the servants would be suspected: he did not disdain to take her purse; with the keys he took from under her pillow he opened her chest of drawers and took some things from it, exactly as an ignorant servant would have done, that is, he left the securities and took only the money; he took a few of the larger gold things, and passed over small things ten times more precious. He took something else, too, as a keepsake for himself, but of that later. Having done this terrible deed, he left by the same way he had come in. Not the next day, when the alarm went up, and not ever afterward in all his life did it enter anyone’s head to suspect the real villain! And no one knew of his love for her either, for he had always been of a silent and uncommunicative character, and had no friend to whom he confided his soul. They considered him simply an acquaintance of the murdered woman, and not even so close a one, for in the last two weeks he had not visited her. Suspicion fell at once on her serf manservant Pyotr, and all the circumstances came together just so as to confirm this suspicion, for this servant knew, and the dead woman herself had made no secret of it, that she intended to give him up as a soldier, to count against the recruit due from her peasants, since he was without family and badly behaved besides. He had been heard threatening, drunk and in a rage, in a drinking house, to kill her. Two days before her death he had run away and was living somewhere in the town, no one knew where. The day after the murder they found him on the road, at the edge of town, dead drunk, a knife in his pocket and, for some reason, blood on his right palm besides. He insisted that the blood had come from his nose, but they did not believe him. The maids confessed that they had been at the party and that the front door from the porch had remained unlocked until their return. And a great many other signs of the same kind turned up, on account of which the innocent servant was seized. They arrested him and began the trial, but just a week later the arrested man fell ill with a fever and died in the hospital without regaining consciousness. With that the case was closed; it was left to the will of God, and everyone, the judges and the authorities and all of society, remained convinced that the crime had been committed by none other than the dead servant. And after that the punishment began.

The mysterious visitor, and now my friend, told me that at first he had not even suffered any pangs of conscience at all. He suffered for a long time, but not from that, only from grief at having killed the woman he loved, at her being gone, at having killed his love by killing her, while the fire of passion still burned in his blood. But of the innocent blood that had been shed, of the killing of a human being, he hardly thought at all then. The thought that his victim might have become another man’s wife seemed impossible to him, and so for a long while his conscience told him he could have done nothing else. In the beginning the arrest of the servant troubled him somewhat, but the swift illness and then the death of the prisoner set his mind at rest, for the man had died, by every evidence (so he reasoned then), not from the arrest or from fright but from a chill he had caught precisely during the days of his running away, when he had lain dead drunk all night on the damp ground. The stolen things and the money troubled him little, for (so he reasoned still) the theft had been done not for gain but to turn suspicion elsewhere. The sum stolen was insignificant, and soon afterward he donated the whole of it, and even a much greater sum, to the almshouse that was being founded in our town. He did it deliberately, to quiet his conscience over the theft, and, remarkably, for a time, and even a long time, he really was at rest; he told me so himself. He threw himself then into great activity in his service, himself asked for a troublesome and difficult assignment that occupied him for some two years, and, being of a strong character, he almost forgot what had happened; and when he did remember, he tried not to think about it at all. He threw himself into charity too, set up much and donated much in our town, made a name for himself in the capitals as well, was elected in Moscow and in Petersburg a member of the charitable societies there. But all the same he began at last to brood, with a torment beyond his strength. Then he took a liking to a beautiful and sensible girl and soon married her, dreaming that marriage would drive away his solitary anguish, and that, by setting out on a new road and zealously fulfilling his duty toward his wife and children, he would get away from the old memories altogether. But precisely the opposite of this expectation happened. In the very first month of the marriage a ceaseless thought began to trouble him: “Here my wife loves me, but what if she found out?” When she became pregnant with their first child and told him of it, he was suddenly troubled: “I am giving life, and I myself took a life.” Children came: “How dare I love them, teach and bring them up, how will I speak to them of virtue: I have shed blood.” The children are growing up beautiful, he wants to caress them: “But I cannot look at their innocent, bright faces; I am unworthy of it.” At last the blood of his murdered victim began to haunt him, menacingly and bitterly, her ruined young life, the blood crying out for vengeance. He began to have terrible dreams. But, being firm of heart, he endured the torment for a long time: “I shall atone for everything by this secret torment of mine.” But this hope too was vain: the further it went, the stronger the suffering grew. In society he came to be respected for his charitable activity, though everyone was afraid of his stern and gloomy character, but the more they came to respect him, the more unbearable it became for him. He confessed to me that he had thought of killing himself. But instead another dream began to haunt him, a dream which at first he considered impossible and mad, but which at last fastened so on his heart that there was no tearing it away. This was his dream: to rise up, go out before the people, and announce to everyone that he had killed a man. For three years or so he went about with this dream; it kept haunting him in different forms. At last he came to believe with all his heart that by declaring his crime he would without doubt heal his soul and be at peace once and for all. But having come to believe it, he felt horror in his heart, for how was he to carry it out? And suddenly this incident at my duel occurred. “Looking at you, I have now made up my mind.” I look at him.

“And can it really be,” I exclaimed to him, throwing up my hands, “that so small an incident could give birth to such resolve in you?”

“My resolve was three years being born,” he answers me, “and your incident only gave it a push. As I looked at you, I reproached myself and envied you,” he said to me, even sternly.

“But they will not believe you,” I observed to him. “Fourteen years have passed.”

“I have proofs, great ones. I shall present them.”

And I wept then, and kissed him.

“Decide one thing for me, one thing!” he said to me (as though everything now depended on me). “My wife, my children! My wife will die of grief, perhaps, and my children, though they will not lose their rank of nobility and their estate, will be the children of a convict, and forever. And the memory, the memory of myself I shall leave in their hearts!”

I am silent.

“And to part with them, to leave them forever? It is forever, forever!”

I sit there, silently whispering a prayer to myself. At last I stood up; I was frightened.

“Well?” he looks at me.

“Go,” I say, “and declare it to the people. Everything will pass; only the truth will remain. Your children will understand, when they grow up, how much magnanimity there was in your great resolve.”

He left me then as if he really had made up his mind. But all the same, for more than two weeks after that he kept coming to me, every evening in a row, still preparing himself, still unable to make up his mind. He wore my heart out. One time he comes in firm and speaks with tender feeling:

“I know that paradise will come for me, it will come at once, as soon as I declare it. For fourteen years I have been in hell. I want to suffer. I shall accept suffering and begin to live. You can go through the world on a lie, but there is no going back. Now it is not only my neighbor that I dare not love, but my own children as well. Lord, but surely my children will understand, perhaps, what my suffering cost me, and will not condemn me! God is not in might but in truth.”

“Everyone will understand your great deed,” I say to him, “if not now, then later they will understand, for you have served the truth, the higher truth, not of this earth…”

And he would leave me as if consoled, and the next day suddenly he comes again, spiteful, pale, and speaks mockingly:

“Every time I come in to you, you look at me with such curiosity: ‘So he hasn’t declared it again?’ Wait, don’t despise me too much. It isn’t as easy to do as it seems to you. Perhaps I won’t do it at all yet. You won’t go and inform on me then, will you, eh?”

And I, it used to be, far from looking at him with foolish curiosity, was afraid even to glance at him. I was worn out to the point of illness, and my soul was full of tears. I even lost my sleep at night.

“I have just come from my wife,” he goes on. “Do you understand what a wife is? When I was leaving, the children called out to me: ‘Goodbye, Papa, come back soon and read Children’s Reading with us.’ No, you don’t understand this! Another man’s trouble doesn’t teach you sense.”

His eyes began to flash, his lips to twitch. Suddenly he struck the table with his fist, so that the things on the table jumped—such a gentle man, it was the first time it had happened to him.

“But is it necessary?” he exclaimed. “Must I? After all, no one was condemned, no one was sent to hard labor on my account, the servant died of illness. And for the blood I shed I have been punished with torments. And they will not believe me at all, they will not believe any of my proofs. Must I declare it, must I? For the blood I shed I am ready to go on suffering all my life, only so as not to strike down my wife and children. Will it be just to ruin them along with myself? Are we not mistaken? Where is the truth here? And will people even recognize this truth, will they value it, will they honor it?”

“Lord!” I think to myself. “He is thinking of people’s esteem at such a moment!” And I felt so sorry for him then that I would, I think, have shared his lot myself, only to relieve him. I see that he is like a man in a frenzy. I was horrified, understanding now not with my mind alone but with my living soul what such a resolve costs.

“Decide my fate, then!” he exclaimed again.

“Go and declare it,” I whispered to him. I did not have the voice for it, but I whispered firmly. Then I took the Gospel from the table, the Russian translation, and showed him John, chapter XII, verse 24:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, 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.” I had read this verse just before he came.

He read it.

“True,” he says, but he smiled bitterly. “Yes, in these books,” he says, after a silence, “you come across terrible things. It’s easy to shove them under a man’s nose. And who wrote them, can it really have been men?”

“The Holy Spirit wrote them,” I say.

“It’s easy for you to chatter,” he smiled again, but now almost with hatred. I took the book again, opened it at another place, and showed him Hebrews, chapter X, verse 31. He read: “It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

He read it and simply flung the book away. He even trembled all over.

“A terrible verse,” he says. “There’s no denying it, you picked a good one.” He got up from the chair. “Well,” he says, “goodbye, perhaps I won’t come again… we shall meet in paradise. So it is fourteen years now since I ‘fell into the hands of the living God’; so that is what these fourteen years are called. Tomorrow I shall ask those hands to let me go…”

I wanted to embrace him and kiss him, but I did not dare, his face was so twisted and he looked so heavily. He went out. “Lord,” I thought, “where has the man gone!” Then I threw myself on my knees before the icon and wept for him to the most holy Mother of God, the swift intercessor and helper. Half an hour or so went by as I stood in tears at prayer, and it was already late at night, about twelve o’clock. Suddenly I look, and the door opens, and he comes in again. I was astonished.

“Where have you been?” I ask him.

“I,” he says, “I think I forgot something… my handkerchief, I think… Well, even if I didn’t forget anything, let me sit down…”

He sat down on a chair. I stand over him. “Sit down too,” he says. I sat down. We sat for two minutes or so; he looks at me intently and suddenly smiled (I remembered this), then he got up, embraced me tightly, and kissed me…

“Remember,” he says, “how I came to you the second time. Do you hear, remember it!”

It was the first time he had said the familiar you to me. And he left. “Tomorrow,” I thought.

And so it came to pass. And I did not know that evening that the next day was precisely his birthday. I myself had not gone out anywhere in the last few days, and so I could not have learned it from anyone. On that day there was a large gathering at his house every year; the whole town came. They came now too. And then, after the dinner, he comes out into the middle of the room, and in his hands is a paper, a formal report to his superiors. And since his superiors were right there, he read the paper aloud then and there to everyone assembled, and in it was a full description of the whole crime in every detail: “As a monster I cast myself out from among men; God has visited me,” he concluded the paper. “I want to suffer!” Then and there he brought out and laid on the table everything by which he thought to prove his crime and which he had kept for fourteen years: the gold things of the murdered woman, which he had stolen, thinking to divert suspicion from himself; her locket and her cross, taken from her neck (in the locket a portrait of her betrothed); her notebook; and finally two letters: her betrothed’s letter to her announcing his speedy arrival, and her answer to this letter, which she had begun and not finished and had left on the table, to send to the post the next day. Both letters he had taken away with him—why? Why had he kept them afterward for fourteen years, instead of destroying them as evidence? And what happened then? Everyone was astonished and horrified, and no one wanted to believe it, though everyone listened with extraordinary curiosity, but as one listens to a sick man, and a few days later it was quite decided and pronounced in every house that the unfortunate man had gone mad. The authorities and the court could not help taking up the case, but they too held back: although the things and letters he presented did give them pause, it was decided here too that even if these documents proved genuine, still a final accusation could not be pronounced on the basis of these documents alone. And besides, he might have had all the things from her herself, as her acquaintance and in trust. I heard, however, that the genuineness of the things was later verified through many acquaintances and relatives of the murdered woman, and that there was no doubt about it. But this case, again, was not destined to be concluded. Some five days later everyone learned that the sufferer had fallen ill and that his life was feared for. What illness it was he fell ill with I cannot explain; it was said to be a disorder of the heartbeat, but it became known that a council of doctors, at the insistence of his wife, had examined his state of mind as well, and had come to the conclusion that madness was already present. I gave nothing away, though people rushed to question me, but when I wished to visit him, for a long time I was forbidden, chiefly by his wife: “It is you,” she says to me, “who unsettled him; he was gloomy before, and in the last year everyone noticed an extraordinary agitation in him and strange behavior, and then you came along and ruined him; it was you who read him out of his wits, he never left your place for a whole month.” And what then? Not only his wife but everyone in town fell upon me and blamed me: “It’s all your doing,” they say. I am silent, and glad in my soul, for I beheld the undoubted mercy of God toward one who had risen up against himself and punished himself. And as for his madness, I could not believe in it. At last they let me in to see him too; he himself insistently demanded it, in order to say farewell to me. I went in and saw at once that it was no longer days he had left but hours. He was weak and yellow, his hands shook, he was gasping for breath, but he looked tender and joyful.

“It is finished!” he said to me. “I have long been thirsting to see you; why didn’t you come?”

I did not tell him that I had not been allowed to see him.

“God has had pity on me and is calling me to himself. I know that I am dying, and yet after so many years I feel joy and peace for the first time. All at once I felt paradise in my soul, as soon as I had done what had to be done. Now I dare to love my children and kiss them. They do not believe me, and no one believed me, neither my wife nor my judges; my children will never believe it either. I see the mercy of God to my children in this. I shall die, and my name will be unstained for them. And now I have a foretaste of God, my heart rejoices as in paradise… I have done my duty…”

He cannot speak, he is gasping, he presses my hand warmly, gazes at me ardently. But we did not talk for long; his wife kept looking in on us. But he did manage to whisper to me:

“And do you remember how I came to you that time, the second time, at midnight? And told you to remember it? Do you know why I came in? Why, I came to kill you!”

I simply shuddered.

“I went out from you then into the darkness, I wandered the streets and struggled with myself. And suddenly I hated you so much that my heart could hardly bear it. ‘Now,’ I think, ‘he alone has bound me, and he is my judge; I can no longer back out of my punishment tomorrow, for he knows everything.’ And it was not that I was afraid you would inform on me (there was not even the thought of it), but I think: ‘How shall I look at him if I don’t inform on myself?’ And even if you were at the ends of the earth, but alive, it would be all the same: unbearable, this thought that you were alive and knew everything and were judging me. I hated you as though you were the cause of it all and to blame for it all. I came back to you then; I remember a dagger was lying on your table. I sat, and asked you to sit, and for a whole minute I was thinking. If I had killed you, I would have perished for that murder all the same, even if I had not declared the earlier crime. But I did not think of that at all, and I did not want to think of it at that minute. I only hated you and wanted with all my might to take revenge on you for everything. But my Lord overcame the devil in my heart. Know, though, that you were never closer to death.”

A week later he died. The whole town followed his coffin to the grave. The archpriest gave a heartfelt sermon. They mourned the terrible illness that had cut short his days. But the whole town rose up against me when they had buried him, and people even stopped receiving me. True, some, few at first, and then more and more, began to believe in the truth of his testimony and took to visiting me often and questioning me with great curiosity and joy: for man loves the fall of the righteous and his disgrace. But I fell silent, and soon left the town altogether, and five months later I was vouchsafed by the Lord God to set out on the firm and seemly path, blessing the unseen finger that had shown me this path so plainly. And the much-suffering servant of God Mikhail I remember in my prayers to this very day, every day.