The Brothers Karamazov

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