The Karamazov Brothers

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  ‘There aren’t any hooks there!’ said Alyosha softly and seriously, gazing at his father.

  ‘Well, well, only shadows of hooks. I know, I know. Didn’t some Frenchman say about hell: ‘j’ai vu l’ombre d’un cocher, qui avec l’ombre d’une brosse frottait l’ombre d’un carrosse’?* How do you know, my boy, that there aren’t any hooks? You’ll sing a different tune after you’ve been with the monks for a while. Anyway, I give you my blessing; see if you can get at the truth, and come back and tell me: after all, it’ll be easier to make the trip to the next world once you know for sure what’s there. And besides, you’ll have a more respectable life with the monks, rather than with an old drunkard like me and those girls of mine… Still, nothing could tarnish an angel like you. But then, perhaps all that holiness won’t rub off on you either; that’s why I’m letting you go, because deep down that’s what I’m hoping will happen. You’ve got your head screwed on all right. The fire is burning in you now, but it’ll die down; you’ll get it out of your system and you’ll come back here. And I’ll be waiting for you, because I feel you’re the only person on earth who hasn’t condemned me, my dear boy, I really feel this, how can I fail to feel it!…’

  And he began to snivel. He was maudlin. He was wicked and maudlin.

  5

  STARTSY

  SOME readers may think of my young man as an immature individual, prone to spiritual excess, a vapid dreamer, a weak, hapless creature. On the contrary, Alyosha was at that time a well-built, ruddy-cheeked, bright-eyed nineteen-year-old, glowing with health. He was very handsome too; slender, of medium height, with dark-brown hair and a regular if slightly elongated, oval face, with sparkling, wide-set, deep-grey eyes, very thoughtful and to all appearances very much at peace with himself. People will say perhaps that rosy cheeks do not preclude either fanaticism or mysticism; however, to me Alyosha seemed more of a realist than anything. Of course, in the monastery he believed absolutely in miracles, but in my opinion miracles never bother a realist. It is not miracles that incline a realist towards faith. A true realist, if he is a non-believer, will always find within himself the strength and the ability not to believe in miracles, and if he is faced with a miracle as an incontrovertible fact he will sooner disbelieve his own senses than accept the fact. And if he does accept the fact, then he will accept it as a natural occurrence hitherto unknown to him. For the realist, faith is not born of miracles, but miracles of faith. Once a realist believes, then, precisely because of his own realism, he must of necessity believe in miracles. The Apostle Thomas declared that he would not believe what he could not see with his own eyes, but when he saw, he said, ‘My Lord and my God!’* Was it a miracle that made him believe? Most probably not; he believed because, quite simply, he wanted to believe, and perhaps, in the secret depths of his being already fully believed even as he proclaimed, ‘Except I shall see… I will not believe.’

  It will be said, perhaps, that Alyosha was slow-witted, backward, had not completed his studies, and so on. That he had not completed his studies is true, but to say that he was slow-witted or stupid would be a great injustice. I shall simply repeat what I have said already: he took this path because at that time it was the only one that captured his imagination and offered the ideal release for his soul, which was striving to escape from darkness into light. To this I must add that he was already to some extent a youth of our times—in other words, naturally honest, insisting on truth, seeking it and believing in it, and, once believing, demanding instant commitment to it with all the strength of his soul and wanting to rush off and perform great deeds, sacrificing all, if necessary even life itself. Although unfortunately these youths do not understand that the sacrifice of life is in most cases perhaps the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to dedicate, for example, five or six years of their exuberant youth to hard, painstaking study and the acquisition of knowledge for the sole purpose of enhancing tenfold their inherent capacity to serve just that cherished truth, that great work which they are committed to accomplish—such a sacrifice as this remains almost completely beyond the capabilities of many of them. Alyosha simply chose the opposite path to that taken by all the others, but with just the same commitment to the speedy accomplishment of great deeds. Scarcely had he been struck by the conviction, after serious thought, that God and immortality existed, than he at once said to himself, ‘I want to live for immortality, and I will accept no compromise.’ In just the same way, had he decided that there was no God and no immortality, he would at once have joined the atheists and socialists (for socialism is not only a question of the conditions of labour or of the so-called fourth estate,* but rather, for the most part, a question of atheism, a question of today’s particular form of atheism; it is a Tower of Babel* built specifically without God, not in order to ascend to heaven from earth, but in order to bring heaven down to earth). Alyosha did not see how he could possibly continue to live as before. It is written, ‘If thou wilt be perfect, give away all that thou hast and come and follow me.’* Alyosha said to himself, ‘I cannot give two roubles instead of “all”, or substitute “go to church” for “follow me”.’ Perhaps he retained some childhood memory of the monastery on the outskirts of our town, where his mother might have taken him to church. Perhaps, too, he had been affected by the slanting rays of the setting sun striking the icon as his mother, the klikusha, held him up to it. He was thoughtful when he arrived, so perhaps he came to us just to have a look, to see whether it was to be all or only two roubles—and at the monastery he met the starets…

  This starets, as I have explained above, was Starets Zosima, but here I should say something about the startsy in Russian monasteries, though I am afraid I feel neither sufficiently competent nor confident to do this. However, I will attempt to give a brief and superficial account of the subject. In the first place, experts and competent authorities maintain that the cult of startsy appeared in our Russian monasteries only very recently, scarcely a hundred years ago, whereas throughout Eastern Orthodoxy, especially in Sinai and on Mount Athos,* it had already existed for more than a thousand years. We are told that it existed in Russia, too, in ancient times, or that it certainly must have existed, but that, owing to the disasters that befell Russia—the Tatar yoke,* the Troubles,* the severance of our previous relations with Eastern Christendom after the fall of Constantinople*—this cult was forgotten and the tradition fell into abeyance. It was revived again at the end of the last century by one of the great zealots (as they were called), Païsy Velichkovsky* and his followers, but even to this day, a hundred years later, it so far exists in only a very few monasteries and has sometimes been discouraged almost to the point of persecution as an unheard-of innovation in Russia. It flourished especially in Optina Pustyn,* the famous monastery of Kozelsk. Who introduced the cult to our monastery and when, I cannot say, but there had already been three successive generations of startsy, and Zosima was the last of these, but now he too was old, feeble, and close to death, and no one knew who was to succeed him. This was an important question for our monastery, which was not as yet particularly famous for anything; it had no relics of saints or authenticated miracle-working icons, no glorious legends connected with its history, no historic achievements or services to the motherland to its name. It had flourished and become famous all over Russia solely because of its startsy, who attracted crowds of worshippers from thousands of versts around—indeed, from all over Russia—to come and listen to them. And so, what is a starets? A starets is one who subsumes your soul, your will, into his soul and into his will. When a starets accepts you, you renounce your own will and surrender to him in total obedience, total self-abnegation.* He who submits himself to this discipline voluntarily accepts an awesome apprenticeship in the hope that, after a long ordeal, he will achieve self-mastery, subjugate the self to such an extent as to attain at last, through lifelong obedience, perfect freedom, that is, freedom from the self, and escape the fate of those who have lived their whole lives without finding their
true selves. This institution—that is, the cult of startsy—does not arise from any theory, but is a practical tradition which evolved in Byzantium and is now already a thousand years old. The obligations due to a starets are not the same as the normal ‘obedience’ that has always been practised in our Russian monasteries. They involve constant confession to the starets by his pupils, and constitute an indissoluble link between master and disciple. There is a story, for example, of how in the very early days of Christianity one such disciple, having failed to perform some requirement of his starets, departed from his monastery in Syria and went to another country, Egypt. There, after harsh and prolonged ordeals, he was deemed worthy of enduring torture and of meeting a martyr’s death. When the church was interring his body, already considered holy, suddenly, as the deacon was intoning the words ‘Catechumens, depart!’*, the coffin in which the martyr’s body was lying flew from its resting-place and out of the church, and this occurred three times. It was finally discovered that this saintly martyr had broken his vow of obedience and had left his starets, and therefore, in spite of his great spiritual attainments, could not be absolved without the permission of his starets. Only when the starets was summoned and released him from his vow could he be interred. Of course, all this is only ancient legend, but here is something that happened not so long ago. A Russian monk was in retreat on Mount Athos, when his starets commanded him to leave Mount Athos, which he loved from the bottom of his heart as a sacred place and a haven of peace, to go first to Jerusalem to worship at the holy places and then to return to Russia, to Siberia in the north: ‘Your place is there, not here.’ Overwhelmed with grief, the monk petitioned the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople to be released from his vow, but the Patriarch replied that not only could he (the Ecumenical Patriarch) not do so, but that there was and could be no power on earth that could release him from his obligation once it had been imposed upon him by a starets, except the starets who had imposed it. Thus the startsy are in certain instances endowed with limitless and unimaginable power. That is why, in many of our monasteries, the cult initially encountered what amounted almost to persecution. On the other hand, the laity at large held the startsy in high regard from the very beginning. For instance, both the common people and the noblest in the land flocked to our monastery to prostrate themselves before the startsy, to confess their doubts, their sins, their sorrows, and to seek counsel and instruction. Seeing this, the opponents of the startsy protested and, amongst other things, maintained that the sacrament of confession was being arbitrarily and frivolously debased, since continual confession to a starets by a monk or layman is entirely non-sacramental. In the end, though, the cult survived and gradually became established in Russian monasteries. It is perhaps true, however, that this proven, thousand-year-old instrument for the moral regeneration of mankind, elevating him from slavery to freedom and moral perfection, could become a double-edged sword, and that some could be led not to humility and ultimate self-mastery, but, on the contrary, to utterly satanic pride—that is, not to freedom, but to enslavement.

  Starets Zosima was about sixty-five, came from a land-owning family, and in his far-off youth had been a soldier and served as an officer in the Caucasus. No doubt it was some special quality of his soul that impressed Alyosha. The starets grew very fond of Alyosha and actually allowed him to share his cell. It should be noted that while Alyosha was living in the monastery, he was as yet in no way committed, could come and go as he wished, even be absent for a whole day, and though he wore a cassock, it was a voluntary act in order not to be different from others in the monastery. But he was happy to do so, of course. Perhaps the strength of his starets and the aura of holiness that continually surrounded him had a profound effect on Alyosha’s youthful imagination. It was often said of Starets Zosima that, because he had received all who came to him to pour out their hearts, anxious for his advice and healing words, for so many years, because he had absorbed so many revelations and confessions, so much grief into his soul, he had acquired a sensitivity so finely tuned that, from one glance at a stranger’s face, he could tell why he had come, what his needs were, and even what kind of suffering tormented his soul, and he astonished, confused, and sometimes almost terrified the supplicant by a recognition of his innermost secret even before a word had been uttered. But Alyosha noticed that many, nearly all, who came to see the starets in private arrived in a state of fear and anxiety, but nearly always left radiant with joy, that the gloomiest face became happy. What astonished Alyosha in particular was that the starets was not at all severe; on the contrary, his manner was almost always jovial. The monks said of him that he was particularly drawn to the worst sinners, that the more sinful a person was, the more he loved him. Nevertheless, the starets had bitter enemies and rivals among the monks even to the very end of his life, but their numbers dwindled and they held their peace, though they included several extremely prominent and important figures in the monastery, such as one very venerable monk who was a great recluse and an extraordinary zealot. Nevertheless, the great majority were undoubtedly on the side of Starets Zosima, and, of these, many were passionately and sincerely devoted to him, even to the point of fanaticism. They were quick to assert, though not out loud, that he was a saint, that already there could be no doubt about this, and, foreseeing his approaching demise, they expected that miracles would soon occur and that the deceased would bring great glory upon the monastery in the near future. Alyosha too believed implicitly in the miraculous powers of the starets, just as he believed in the story of the coffin flying out of the church. He saw that many of those who came with their sick children or adult relatives, begging the starets to lay his hands on them and say a prayer over them, would soon return, some even the next day, to prostrate themselves in tears before him and thank him for healing their sick ones. The question of whether such healing was really a cure or merely a natural remission in the course of the illness did not arise for Alyosha, for he already believed firmly in the spiritual powers of his teacher, whose glory he felt as his own. His heart leapt and his eyes shone, especially when Starets Zosima appeared before the common people who were waiting in a crowd at the hermitage gate, having come on pilgrimages from all over Russia to see the starets and receive his blessing. They would prostrate themselves before him, weep, kiss his feet, kiss the earth on which he stood, and wail; women would hold out their children to him and usher forward their sick klikushi. The starets would talk to them, say a short prayer over them, bless them, and send them away. Recently, since the onset of his illness, he had sometimes been so weak that he barely had the strength to leave his cell, and the pilgrims sometimes waited several days at the monastery for him to appear. For Alyosha, there was no question about why they loved him so much, why they prostrated themselves before him and wept with emotion at the mere sight of his face. Oh, he understood perfectly that for the downtrodden soul of the Russian man, afflicted by hardship and sorrow and, above all, by perpetual injustice and perpetual sin, his own and the world’s, there was no more crying need nor greater comfort than to find some shrine or saint and prostrate themselves in veneration: ‘Although we have sinned, lied, and fallen into temptation, somewhere on earth there is still one who is high and holy, who comprehends the truth and who knows the truth; and this means that the truth will not die on earth, but shall one day be given to us too, and shall reign over all the earth, as it was promised.’ Alyosha knew and understood that that was what the people felt and how they thought; and in common with those weeping peasants and their sick wives, holding aloft their children to the starets, he had not the slightest doubt that the starets was actually that saint, that guardian of God’s truth. And the conviction that the monastery would gain extraordinary glory when the starets died persisted in Alyosha’s heart, perhaps even more strongly than in anyone else’s at the monastery. Of late, a kind of deep, incandescent inner ecstasy had been burning more and more strongly in his heart. The fact that this starets stood before him as a lone i
ndividual did not trouble him in the least. ‘It doesn’t matter, he is holy; in his heart he holds the secret of renewal for all, that power which will finally establish truth upon earth, when all shall be holy, and shall love one another, and there shall be neither rich nor poor, neither exalted nor downtrodden, and all shall be as children of God, and Christ’s Kingdom shall truly have come.’ Such was the dream of Alyosha’s heart.