Текст книги "The Brothers Karamazov"
Автор книги: Федор Достоевский
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Nota bene:Fyodor Pavlovich had heard the ringing of rumor’s bells. At one time there had been malicious gossip, which even reached the Bishop (and not only about our monastery but about others where the institution of elders had been established), that the elders seemed to be respected overmuch, to the detriment even of the position of Superior, and that, among other things, the elders allegedly abused the sacrament of confession, and so on and so forth. The accusations were absurd and eventually died down of themselves, both here and everywhere. But the silly devil who had snatched up Fyodor Pavlovich and carried him on his own nerves further and further into the shameful deep prompted him to this former accusation, which Fyodor Pavlovich could not even begin to understand. Nor did he manage to formulate it correctly, the more so since this time no one had knelt down in the elder’s cell and confessed aloud, so that Fyodor Pavlovich could have seen nothing of the sort and was simply repeating old rumors and gossip, which he recalled haphazardly. But, having uttered this foolishness, he suddenly felt that he had blurted out some absurd nonsense, and he wanted at once to prove to his listeners and above all to himself that what he had said was not nonsense at all. And though he knew perfectly well that with each word he would be adding more and more absurdities of the same sort to the nonsense he had already spoken, still he could not help himself and plunged headlong off the mountain.
“How vile!” cried Pyotr Alexandrovich.
“Excuse me,” the Superior said suddenly. “Of old it was said: ‘And they began to speak against me many things and evil things. And I heard it and said within myself: this is the medicine of Jesus, which he has sent me to heal my vain soul.’ And therefore we, too, humbly thank you, our precious guest.”
And he bowed deeply to Fyodor Pavlovich.
“Tut, tut, tut! Humbug and old phrases! Old phrases and old sentences! Old lies and conventional bows! We know these bows! ‘A kiss on the lips and a dagger in the heart,’ as in Schiller’s Robbers. [70] I don’t like falseness, fathers, I want the truth! And the truth is not in gudgeons, I’ve already declared as much! Father monks, why do you fast? Why do you expect a heavenly reward for that? For such a reward, I’ll go and start fasting, too! No, holy monk, try being virtuous in life, be useful to society without shutting yourself up in a monastery on other people’s bread, and without expecting any reward up there—that’s a little more difficult. I, too, can talk sensibly, Father Superior. What have we got here?” He went up to the table. “Old port wine from Factori’s, Médoc bottled by Eliseyev Brothers! [71]A far cry from gudgeons, eh, fathers? Look at all these bottles the fathers have set out—heh, heh, heh! And who has provided it all? The Russian peasant, the laborer, bringing you the pittance earned by his callused hands, taking it from his family, from the needs of the state! You, holy fathers, are sucking the people’s blood!”
“That is altogether unworthy on your part,” said Father Iosif. Father Paissy was stubbornly silent. Miusov rushed from the room, with Kalganov behind him.
“Well, fathers, I will follow Pyotr Alexandrovich! And I won’t come back again, even if you beg me on bended knee, I won’t come back. I sent you a thousand roubles, and now you’ve got your eyes cocked, heh, heh, heh! No, I won’t add any more. I’m taking revenge for my lost youth, for all my humiliations!” He pounded the table with his fist in a fit of sham emotion. “This little monastery has played a big part in my life! I’ve shed many a bitter tear because of it! You turned my wife, the shrieker, against me. You cursed me at all seven councils, [72]you smeared my name over the whole district! Enough, fathers! This is the age of liberalism, the age of steamships and railways. You’ll get nothing from me—not a thousand roubles, not a hundred roubles, not even a hundred kopecks!”
Another notabene: our monastery never meant anything special in his life, and he had never shed any bitter tears because of it. But he was so carried away by his own sham tears that for a moment he almost believed himself; he even as much as wept from self-pity; but at the same moment he felt it was time to rein himself in. In reply to his wicked lie, the Superior inclined his head and again spoke imposingly:
“It is said, again: ‘Suffer with joy the dishonor which providentially befalleth thee, and be not troubled, neither hate him who dishonoreth thee.’ So shall we do.”
“Tut, tut, tut! They will have bethought themselves and the rest of that balderdash! You bethink yourselves, fathers, and I will go. And I’m taking my son Alexei away from here forever, on my parental authority. Ivan Fyodorovich, my most respectful son, allow me to order you to follow me! Von Sohn, why should you stay here? Come home with me now. We’ll have fun. It’s just a mile away. Instead of lenten oil, I’ll serve suckling pig with kasha stuffing; we’ll have dinner, then some cognac, and liqueurs, I have a cloudberry liqueur ... Hey, von Sohn, don’t miss your chance!”
He went out shouting and waving his arms. It was at this moment that Rakitin saw him leaving and pointed him out to Alyosha.
“Alexei!” his father cried from far off when he saw him, “move back in with me today, for good, bring your pillow and mattress, don’t leave a trace behind!”
Alyosha stopped in his tracks, silently and attentively observing the scene. Fyodor Pavlovich meanwhile got into his carriage, and Ivan Fyodorovich started to get in after him, silently and glumly, without even turning to say good-bye to Alyosha. But at that point one more clownish and almost incredible scene took place, which put the finishing touch to the whole episode. The landowner Maximov suddenly appeared on the step of the carriage. He ran up, panting, afraid of being late. Alyosha and Rakitin saw him running. He was in such a hurry that in his impatience he put his foot on the step where Ivan Fyodorovich’s left foot was still standing and, clutching the side, started to jump into the carriage. “Me, too, I’m coming with you!” he cried, jumping, laughing his merry little laugh, with a blissful look on his face, ready for anything. “Take me, too!”
“Didn’t I tell you?” Fyodor Pavlovich cried in delight. “He’s von Sohn! He’s the real von Sohn, risen from the dead! But how did you get away? What did you vonsohn in there, how did you manage to get out of the dinner? It takes a brazen face! I have one, but I’m still surprised at yours! Jump, jump in quick! Let him in, Vanya, it will be fun. We’ll find room for him somewhere at our feet. Will you lie at our feet, von Sohn? Or shall we stick him in the box with the coachman ... ? Jump up in the box, von Sohn...!”
But Ivan Fyodorovich, who had sat down by then, silently and with all his force gave Maximov a sudden shove in the chest that sent him flying for two yards. It was only by chance that he did not fall.
“Drive!” Ivan Fyodorovich shouted angrily to the coachman.
“What’s got into you? What’s got into you? Why did you do that to him?” Fyodor Pavlovich heaved himself up, but the carriage was already moving. Ivan Fyodorovich did not answer.
“How do you like that?” Fyodor Pavlovich said again after two minutes of silence, looking askance at his boy. “You started this whole monastery business, you urged it, you approved it, why are you angry now?”
“Enough of this drivel. Take a little break, now at least,” Ivan Fyodorovich snapped sternly.
Fyodor Pavlovich was again silent for about two minutes.
“Be nice to have some cognac,” he remarked sententiously. But Ivan Fyodorovich did not reply.
“You’ll have a drink, too, when we get there.”
Ivan Fyodorovich still said nothing.
Fyodor Pavlovich waited for about two minutes more.
“I’ll still take Alyoshka from the monastery, despite the fact that it will be very unpleasant for you, my most respectful Karl von Moor.”
Ivan Fyodorovich shrugged contemptuously and, turning away, began staring at the road. They did not speak again until they reached home.
BOOK III: THE SENSUALISTS
Chapter 1: In the Servants’ Quarters
The house of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov stood far from in the very center of town, yet not quite on the outskirts. It was rather decrepit, but had a pleasant appearance: one-storied, with an attic, painted a gray color, and with a red iron roof. However, it had many good years left, and was roomy and snug. It had all sorts of closets, all sorts of nooks and unexpected little stairways. There were rats in it, but Fyodor Pavlovich was not altogether angry with them: “Still, it’s not so boring in the evenings when one is alone.” And indeed he had the custom of dismissing the servants to their cottage for the night and locking himself up in the house alone for the whole night. This cottage stood in the yard. It was spacious and solid; and Fyodor Pavlovich also appointed his kitchen to be there, though there was a kitchen in the main house: he did not like kitchen smells, and food was carried across the yard winter and summer. As a matter of fact, the house had been built for a large family: it could have accommodated five times as many masters and servants. But at the moment of our story, only Fyodor Pavlovich and Ivan Fyodorovich lived in the house, and in the cottage there were just three servants: the old man Grigory, the old woman Marfa, his wife, and the servant Smerdyakov, who was still a young man. We must say a little more in particular about these three auxiliary persons. We have already said enough, however, about old Grigory Vasilievich Kutuzov. He was a firm and unwavering man, who persistently and directly pursued his point, provided that this point for some reason (often surprisingly illogical) stood before him as an immutable truth. Generally speaking, he was honest and incorruptible. His wife, Marfa Ignatievna, despite the fact that she had submitted unquestioningly to her husband’s will all her life, pestered him terribly, just after the emancipation of the serfs, for example, to leave Fyodor Pavlovich and move to Moscow to open some sort of little shop there (they had some money); but Grigory then decided once and for all that the woman was talking nonsense, “for every woman is without honor,” and that they should not leave their former master, whatever sort he was, “for it was now their duty.”
“Do you understand what duty is?” he asked Marfa Ignatievna. “I understand about duty, Grigory Vasilievich, but why it should be our duty to stay here, that I do not understand at all,” Marfa Ignatievna replied firmly.
“Don’t understand, then, but that is how it will be. Henceforth hold your tongue.”
And so it was: they did not leave, and Fyodor Pavlovich appointed them a salary, a small one, but he paid it. Besides that, Grigory knew that he had an unquestionable influence over his master. He felt it, and he was right. A cunning and obstinate buffoon, Fyodor Pavlovich, while he had a very firm character “in certain things in life,” as he himself put it, showed, to his own surprise, even a rather weakish character in certain other “things in life. “ And he knew which ones, he knew and was afraid of many things. In certain things in life one had to be on one’s guard, and that was difficult without a faithful man. And Grigory was a most faithful man. It even so happened that many times in the course of his career, Fyodor Pavlovich might have been beaten, and beaten badly, but Grigory always came to his rescue, though he admonished him each time afterwards. But Fyodor Pavlovich would not have been afraid of beatings alone: there were higher occasions, even rather subtle and complicated ones, when Fyodor Pavlovich himself would have been unable, perhaps, to explain this remarkable need for a close and faithful man that he would sometimes, all of a sudden, momentarily and inconceivably, begin to feel in himself. These occasions were almost morbid: most depraved, and, in his sensuality, often as cruel as a wicked insect, Fyodor Pavlovich at times suddenly felt in himself, in his drunken moments, a spiritual fear, a moral shock, that almost, so to speak, resounded physically in his soul. “On those occasions it’s as if my soul were fluttering in my throat,” he sometimes used to say. And at such moments he was glad that nearby, close at hand, maybe not in the same room but in the cottage, there was such a man, firm, devoted, not at all like himself, not depraved, who, though he saw all this depravity going on and knew all the secrets, still put up with it all out of devotion, did not protest, and—above all—did not reproach him or threaten him with anything either in this age or in the age to come, and who would defend him if need be—from whom? From someone unknown, but terrible and dangerous. The thing precisely was that there should be anotherman, ancient and amicable, who could be summoned in a morbid moment, so that he could look him in the face and perhaps exchange a few words, even quite irrelevant words, and if it’s all right and he does not get angry, then somehow it eases the heart, but if he gets angry, well, then it’s a little sadder. It happened (very rarely, however) that Fyodor Pavlovich would even go at night to the cottage to wake Grigory so that Grigory could come to him for a moment. Grigory would come, and Fyodor Pavlovich would begin talking about perfect trifles, and would soon let him go, sometimes even with a little joke or jibe, and would spit and go to bed himself, and sleep the sleep of the blessed. Something of this sort happened to Fyodor Pavlovich when Alyosha arrived. Alyosha “pierced his heart” because he “lived there, saw everything, and condemned nothing.” Moreover, he brought something unprecedented with him: a complete lack of contempt for him, the old man, and, on the contrary, an unvarying affection and a perfectly natural, single-hearted attachment to him, little though he deserved it. All of this came as a perfect surprise to the solitary old lecher; it was quite unexpected for him, who until then had loved only “iniquity.” When Alyosha left, he admitted to himself that he had understood something that until then he had been unwilling to understand.
I mentioned at the beginning of my story that Grigory hated Adelaide Ivanovna, Fyodor Pavlovich’s first wife and the mother of his first son, Dmitri Fyodorovich, and that, on the contrary, he defended his second wife, the shrieker, Sofia Ivanovna, against his master himself and against all who might chance to speak a bad or flippant word about her. His sympathy for the unfortunate woman became something sacred to him, so that even twenty years later he would not suffer a slighting allusion to her from anyone at all, and would at once object to the offender. Outwardly Grigory was a cold and pompous man, taciturn, delivering himself of weighty, unfrivolous words. In the same way, it was impossible to tell at first glance whether he loved his meek, obedient wife or not, and yet he really did love her, and she, of course, knew it. This Marfa Ignatievna not only was not a stupid woman, but was even perhaps more intelligent than her husband, at least more reasonable than he in everyday things, and yet she submitted to him without a murmur and without complaint from the very beginning of their married life, and unquestionably respected his spiritual superiority. It was remarkable that all their life they spoke very little to each other, and then only of the most necessary daily things. Pompous and majestic Grigory always thought through all his affairs and concerns by himself, and Marfa Ignatievna had long ago understood once and for all that he had absolutely no need of her advice. She felt that her husband valued her silence and took it as a sign of her intelligence. He had never beaten her, save only once, and then slightly. In the first year of the marriage of Adelaide Ivanovna and Fyodor Pavlovich, one day in the village, the village girls and women, who were then still serfs, were gathered in the master’s yard to sing and dance. They began “In the Meadows,” and suddenly Marfa Ignatievna, then still a young woman, leaped out in front of the chorus and performed the “Russian dance” in a special manner, not as village women did it, but as she used to dance when she was a servant of the wealthy Miusovs, in their own household theater, where they were taught to dance by a dancing master invited from Moscow. Grigory saw his wife’s performance and, back home, an hour later, taught her a lesson by pulling her hair a little. There the beatings ended forever, and were not repeated even once in the rest of their life, and Marfa Ignatievna also foreswore dancing.
God did not grant them children; there was one baby, but it died. Grigory obviously loved children, and did not even conceal it, that is, he was not ashamed to show it. After Adelaida Ivanovna fled, he took charge of Dmitri Fyodorovich, then a three-year-old boy, and fussed over him for almost a year, combing his hair and even washing him in a tub himself. He took the same trouble over Ivan Fyodorovich, and then over Alyosha, for which he received a slap in the face; but I have already related all that. His own baby gave him only the joy of hope while Marfa Ignatievna was still pregnant. When it was born, it struck his heart with grief and horror. The fact is that the boy was born with six fingers. [73]Seeing this, Grigory was so mortified that he not only kept silent up to the very day of the baptism, but even went out to the garden especially to be silent. It was spring, and he spent all three days digging beds in the vegetable garden. On the third day they were to baptize the infant; by then Grigory had worked something out. Going into the cottage where the clergy and guests had gathered, including, finally, Fyodor Pavlovich himself, who came in person to be the godfather, he suddenly announced that “the baby oughtn’t to be baptized at all”—announced it not loudly or in many words, but speaking each word through his teeth, and only gazing dully and intently at the priest.
“Why not?” asked the priest with good-humored astonishment.
“Because ... it’s a dragon ... ,” Grigory muttered.
“A dragon? How is he a dragon?”
Grigory was silent for a while.
“A confusion of natures occurred ... ,” he muttered, rather vaguely but very firmly, apparently unwilling to say more.
There was laughter, and of course the poor baby was baptized. At the font, Grigory prayed zealously, yet he did not change his opinion about the newborn. However, he did not interfere in any way, but for the two weeks that the sickly boy lived, he scarcely ever looked at him, did not even want to notice him, and kept away from the house most of the time. When the child died of thrush two weeks later, he himself put him into the little coffin, looked at him with deep grief, and when his shallow little grave was covered with earth, he knelt and prostrated before it. For many years afterwards he never once mentioned his child, and Marfa Ignatievna never once recalled her child in his presence, and whenever she happened to talk with someone about her “baby,” she spoke in a whisper, even if Grigory Vasilievich was not present. As Marfa Ignatievna observed, ever since that little grave, he had mainly concerned himself with “the divine,” reading the Lives of the Saints, mostly silently and by himself, and each time putting on his big, round silver spectacles. He rarely read aloud, except during Lent. He loved the Book of Job, [74]and somewhere obtained a copy of the homilies and sermons of “Our God-bearing Father, Isaac the Syrian,” [75]which he read persistently over many years, understanding almost nothing at all of it, but perhaps precisely for that reason prizing and loving it all the more. Of late he had noticed and begun to take an interest in the Flagellants, [76]for which there was an opportunity in the neighborhood; he was apparently shaken, but did not deem it necessary to convert to the new faith. Assiduous reading in “the divine” certainly added to the pomposity of his physiognomy.
He was perhaps inclined to mysticism. And here, as if by design, the occasion of the arrival in the world of his six-fingered baby and its death coincided with another very strange, unexpected, and original occurrence, which left, as he himself once put it later, “a stamp” on his soul. It happened that on the very day when they buried their six-fingered infant, Marfa Ignatievna, awakened during the night, heard what sounded like the cry of a newborn baby. She was frightened and woke her husband. He listened and observed that it was more likely someone groaning, “possibly a woman.” He got up and dressed; it was a rather warm May night. Stepping out on the porch, he heard clearly that the groans were coming from the garden. But the garden was always locked from inside for the night, and it was impossible to get in except by that entrance, because the whole garden was surrounded with a high, sturdy fence. Grigory went back in, lighted a lantern, took the garden key, and paying no attention to the hysterical terror of his wife, who kept insisting that she heard a baby crying, and that it could only be her little boy crying and calling her, he silently went out to the garden. There he clearly recognized that the groans were coming from their bathhouse, which stood in the garden not far from the gate, and that they were indeed the groans of a woman. He opened the bathhouse door and was dumbfounded by what he saw: a local girl, a holy fool who roamed the streets and was known to the whole town as Stinking Lizaveta, had gotten into the bathhouse and just given birth to an infant. The infant was lying beside her, and she was dying beside him. She said nothing, for the simple reason that she had never been able to speak. But all this had better be explained separately.
Chapter 2: Stinking Lizaveta
There was one particular circumstance here that deeply shocked Grigory, ultimately strengthening in him an earlier, unpleasant and abhorrent, suspicion. This Stinking Lizaveta was a very short girl, “a wee bit under five feet,” as many pious old ladies in our town touchingly recalled after her death. Her twenty-year-old face, healthy, broad, and ruddy, was completely idiotic; and the look in her eyes was fixed and unpleasant, though mild. All her life, both summer and winter, she went barefoot and wore only a hempen shift. Her nearly black hair, extremely thick and as curly as sheep’s wool, formed a sort of huge hat on her head. Besides, it was always dirty with earth and mud, and had little leaves, splinters, and shavings stuck to it, because she always slept on the ground and in the mud. Her father was homeless and sickly, a failed tradesman named Ilya, who had fits of heavy drinking and for many years had been sponging off one of our well-to-do middle-class families as some sort of handyman. Lizaveta’s mother had long been dead. Eternally ill and angry, Ilya used to beat Lizaveta brutally whenever she came home. But she rarely came home, because she went begging all over town as a holy fool of God. Both Ilya’s employers and Ilya himself, and even many compassionate townspeople, mainly merchants and their wives, tried more than once to clothe Lizaveta more decently than in her one shift, and towards winter always put a sheepskin coat and a pair of boots on her; but she, though she let them put every-thing on her without protesting, usually went away somewhere, most often to the porch of the cathedral church, and took off all they had given her– whether a kerchief, a skirt, or a sheepskin coat and boots—left it there, and went away barefoot, dressed as before only in her shift. It happened once that the new governor of our province, observing our town on a visit, was greatly offended in his noblest feelings when he saw Lizaveta, and though he understood that she was a “holy fool,” as had been reported to him, nevertheless pointed out that a young girl wandering around in her shift was an offense to public decency, and that a stop should be put to it. But the governor left and Lizaveta remained as she was. Her father finally died, and she thereby became even dearer, as an orphan, to all the pious people in town. Indeed, everyone seemed to like her, and even the boys did not tease or insult her, though our boys, especially at school, are a mischievous lot. She walked into strangers’ houses and no one turned her out; quite the opposite, everyone was nice to her and gave her a kopeck. When she was given a kopeck, she would accept it and at once take it and put it in some poor box in the church or prison. When she was given a roll or a bun in the marketplace, she always went and gave this roll or bun to the first child she met, or else she would stop some one of our wealthiest ladies and give it to her; and the ladies would even gladly accept it. She herself lived only on black bread and water. She would sometimes stop in at an expensive shop and sit down, and though there were costly goods and money lying about, the owners were never wary of her: they knew that even if someone had put thousands down and forgotten them, she would not take a kopeck. She rarely went into a church, but she used to sleep on church porches, or in kitchen gardens, having climbed over someone’s wattle fence (we still have many wattle fences instead of real fences, even to this day). She would go home—that is, to the home of those people her late father had lived with—about once a week, every day in winter, but only to spend the night, and she slept either in the hallway or in the barn. People marveled that she could endure such a life, but it was what she was used to; though she was small, she was remarkably sturdy. There were some among our gentry who said she did it all out of pride; but that somehow did not make sense; she could not even speak a word, and would only rarely move her tongue and mumble—how could she have been proud? And so it happened that once (this was quite a while ago), on a bright and warm September night, under a full moon, rather late by our standards, a bunch of drunken gentlemen, five or six hearty fellows, were returning home from their club “by the back way.” There were wattle fences on both sides of the lane, behind which lay the kitchen gardens of the adjacent houses; the lane gave onto a plank bridge that crossed the long, stinking puddle it is our custom sometimes to call a stream. Near the wattle fence, among the nettles and burdock, our band discovered Lizaveta sleeping. The tipsy gentlemen looked down at her, laughing loudly, and began producing all sorts of unprintable witticisms. It suddenly occurred to one young sir to pose a completely bizarre question on an impossible subject: “Could anyone possibly regard such an animal as a woman, right now, for instance?” and so on. With lofty disdain, they all declared it impossible. But the group happened to include Fyodor Pavlovich, and he at once popped up and declared that, yes, she could be regarded as a woman, even very much so, and that there was even some piquancy in it of a special sort, and so on and so forth. It’s true that at that time he was even overzealously establishing himself as a buffoon, and loved to pop up and amuse the gentlemen, ostensibly as an equal, of course, though in reality he was an absolute boor beside them. It was exactly at the same time that he received the news from Petersburg about the death of his first wife, Adelaide Ivanovna, and, with crêpe on his hat, went drinking and carousing so outrageously that some people in our town, even the most dissolute, cringed at the sight. The bunch, of course, burst out laughing at this unexpected opinion; one of them even began urging Fyodor Pavlovich on, but the rest spat even more disgustedly, though still with the utmost merriment, and finally they all went on their way. Later, Fyodor Pavlovich swore that he, too, had left with everyone else; maybe it was so, no one knows or ever knew for certain, but about five or six months later the whole town began asking, with great and genuine indignation, why Lizaveta was walking around pregnant, and trying to find out: who was the sinner? Who was the offender? And then suddenly a strange rumor spread all over town that the offender was none other than Fyodor Pavlovich. Where did the rumor come from? Of that bunch of drunken gentlemen, only one participant remained in our town by then, and he was an elderly and respectable state councillor, [77]a family man with grown-up daughters, who would by no means have spread anything, even if there were some truth in it. The rest of the participants, about five in all, had left by that time. But the rumor pointed straight at Fyodor Pavlovich, and kept pointing at him. Of course he never owned up to it: he would not even deign to answer such petty merchants and tradesmen. He was proud then, and refused to speak anywhere but in the company of the civil servants and gentlemen whom he entertained so well. This time Grigory stood up for his master energetically and with all his might, and not only defended him against all this slander but even got into arguments and disputes and managed to convince many people. “She herself is to blame, the low creature,” he asserted, and the offender was none other than “Karp with the Screw” (this was the nickname of a horrible convict, well known at the time, who had just escaped from the provincial prison and was secretly living in our town). This surmise seemed plausible: Karp was remembered, it was specifically remembered that on those very nights, in autumn, he had been lurking around town and had robbed three people. But the whole affair and all this gossip not only did not turn people’s sympathy away from the poor holy fool, but everyone began looking after her and protecting her all the more. The widow of the merchant Kondratiev, a wealthy woman, even arranged it all so that by the end of April she had brought Lizaveta to her house, intending to keep her there until she gave birth. They guarded her vigilantly, but in the end, despite their vigilance, on the very last day, in the evening, Lizaveta suddenly left the widow’s house unobserved and turned up in Fyodor Pavlovich’s garden. How she managed, in her condition, to climb over the high and sturdy garden fence remained rather a mystery. Some asserted that “someone had lifted her over,” others that “it had lifted her over.” Most likely everything happened in a natural, if rather tricky, way: Lizaveta, who knew how to climb over wattle fences to spend the night in people’s kitchen gardens, somehow also climbed up onto Fyodor Pavlovich’s fence and from there jumped down into the garden, despite her condition, though not without harming herself. Grigory rushed to Marfa Ignatievna and sent her to help Lizaveta while he himself ran to bring the midwife, an old tradeswoman who happened to live nearby. The child was saved, but Lizaveta died towards morning. Grigory took the infant, brought him into the house, sat his wife down, and put him in her lap near her breast: “God’s orphan child is everyone’s kin, all the more so for you and me. Our little dead one sent us this one, who was born of the devil’s son and a righteous woman. Nurse him and weep no more.” And so Marfa Ignatievna brought the baby up. He was baptized and given the name of Pavel; as for his patronymic, as if by unspoken agreement everyone began calling him Fyodorovich. Fyodor Pavlovich made no objection to anything, and even found it all amusing, though he still vehemently disavowed it all. The townspeople were pleased that he had taken the foundling in. Later on, Fyodor Pavlovich invented a last name for the child: he called him Smerdyakov, after the name of his mother, Lizaveta Smerdyashchaya. [78]This Smerdyakov became Fyodor Pavlovich’s second servant, and was living, at the time our story begins, with old Grigory and Marfa in the servants’ cottage. He was employed as a cook. I ought to say a little more about him in particular, but I am ashamed to distract my reader’s attention for such a long time to such ordinary lackeys, and therefore I shall go back to my narrative, hoping that with regard to Smerdyakov things will somehow work themselves out in the further course of the story.
