The Brothers Karamazov

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.

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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.