I have already mentioned that he had grown very bloated. His physiognomy by that time presented something that testified acutely to the characteristics and essence of his whole life. Besides the long, fleshy bags under his eternally insolent, suspicious, and leering little eyes, besides the multitude of deep wrinkles on his fat little face, a big Adam’s apple, fleshy and oblong like a purse, hung below his sharp chin, giving him a sort of repulsively sensual appearance. Add to that a long, carnivorous mouth with plump lips, behind which could be seen the little stumps of black, almost decayed teeth. He sprayed saliva whenever he spoke. However, he himself liked to make jokes about his own face, although he was apparently pleased with it. He pointed especially to his nose, which was not very big but was very thin and noticeably hooked. “A real Roman one,” he used to say. “Along with my Adam’s apple, it gives me the real physiognomy of an ancient Roman patrician of the decadent period.” He seemed to be proud of it.

And then, quite soon after finding his mother’s grave, Alyosha suddenly announced to him that he wanted to enter the monastery and that the monks were prepared to accept him as a novice. He explained further that this was his highest desire and that he was asking for his solemn consent as his father. The old man already knew that the elder Zosima, who was seeking salvation in the monastery hermitage, had made a particular impression on his “quiet boy.”

“That elder is, of course, the most honest man there,” he remarked, having listened to Alyosha silently and thoughtfully, almost, however, as if he were not at all surprised by his request. “Hm ... so that’s where you want to go, my quiet boy!” He was half drunk, and suddenly smiled his long, half-drunken smile, which was not devoid of cunning and drunken slyness. “Hm ... I even had a feeling you’d end up with something like that, can you imagine? That’s just where you were headed. Well, why not? After all, you do have your little two thousand—there’s a dowry for you!—and I, my angel, will never forget you, I’ll pay in for you now, too, whatever’s due, if they ask. And if they don’t ask, well, we can’t go pushing ourselves on them, can we? You spend money like a canary, anyway, two little grains a week ... Hm. You know, there’s one monastery that has a little village nearby, and everybody around knows that only ‘monastery wives’ live there, that’s what they call them, about thirty little bits of wives, I’d say ... I was there, and, you know, it’s interesting—in its own way, of course, for the sake of variety. The only trouble is this terrible Russianism, there are no French women at all, not so far, and there could be, the money’s there, plenty of it. Once the word gets around, they’ll come. Well, there’s nothing like that here, no monastery wives, and about two hundred monks. It’s honest. They fast. I admit it ... Hm. So you want to go to the monks? You know, I’m sorry for you, Alyosha, truly, believe me, I’ve grown to love you ... However, it’s a good opportunity: you can pray for us sinners, we’ve sat around sinning too much. I keep thinking all the time: who is ever going to pray for me? Is there anyone in the world? My dear boy, you know, I’m terribly stupid about these things, would you believe it? Terribly stupid. You see, stupid as I am, I still keep thinking about it, I keep thinking, every once in a while, of course, not all the time. Surely it’s impossible, I think, that the devils will forget to drag me down to their place with their hooks when I die. And then I think: hooks? Where do they get them? What are they made of? Iron? Where do they forge them? Have they got some kind of factory down there? You know, in the monastery the monks probably believe there’s a ceiling in hell, for instance. Now me, I’m ready to believe in hell, only there shouldn’t be any ceiling; that would be, as it were, more refined, more enlightened, more Lutheran, in other words. Does it really make any difference—with a ceiling or without a ceiling? But that’s what the damned question is all about! Because if there’s no ceiling, then there are no hooks. And if there are no hooks, the whole thing falls apart, which, again, is unlikely, because then who will drag me down with hooks, because if they don’t drag me down, what then, and where is there any justice in the world? Il faudrait les inventer,^[10]those hooks, just for me, for me alone, because you have no idea, Alyosha, what a stinker I am...!” “No, there are no hooks there,” Alyosha said quietly and seriously, studying his father.

“Yes, yes. Only shadows of hooks. I know, I know. That’s how one Frenchman described hell: J’ai vul’ombre d’un cocher, qui avec l’ombre d’une brosse frottait l’ombre d’une carrosse.^[11]How do you know, my dear, that there are no hooks? When you’ve been with the monks for a while, you’ll sing a different tune. But go, get to the truth there, and come back and tell me: anyway it will be easier to go to the other world knowing for certain what it’s like. And it will be more proper for you to live with the monks than with me, a little old drunk man with his young girls ... though you’re like an angel, nothing touches you. Well, maybe nothing will touch you there either, that’s why I’m letting you do it, because I hope for that. The devil hasn’t made off with your wits. You’ll burn and burn out, you’ll get cured and come back. And I’ll be waiting for you: I really feel you’re the only one in the world who hasn’t condemned me, you are, my dear boy, I feel it, how can I not feel it...!”

He even began to snivel. He was sentimental. He was wicked and sentimental.

Chapter 5: Elders

Perhaps some of my readers will think that my young man was a sickly, ecstatic, poorly developed person, a pale dreamer, a meager, emaciated little fellow. On the contrary, Alyosha was at that time a well-built, red-cheeked nineteen-year-old youth, clear-eyed and bursting with health. He was at that time even quite handsome, slender, of above-average height, with dark brown hair, a regular though slightly elongated face, and bright, deep gray, widely set eyes, rather thoughtful, and apparently rather serene. Some will say, perhaps, that red cheeks are quite compatible with both fanaticism and mysticism, but it seems to me that Alyosha was even more of a realist than the rest of us. Oh, of course, in the monastery he believed absolutely in miracles, but in my opinion miracles will never confound a realist. It is not miracles that bring a realist to faith. A true realist, if he is not a believer, will always find in himself the strength and ability not to believe in miracles as well, and if a miracle stands before him as an irrefutable fact, he will sooner doubt his own senses than admit the fact. And even if he does admit it, he will admit it as a fact of nature that was previously unknown to him. In the realist, faith is not born from miracles, but miracles from faith. Once the realist comes to believe, then, precisely because of his realism, he must also allow for miracles. The Apostle Thomas declared that he would not believe until he saw, and when he saw, he said: “My Lord and my God!“^[12] Was it the miracle that made him believe? Most likely not, but he believed first and foremost because he wished to believe, and maybe already fully believed in his secret heart even as he was saying: “I will not believe until I see.”

Some will say, perhaps, that Alyosha was slow, undeveloped, had not finished his studies, and so on. That he had not finished his studies is true, but to say that he was slow or stupid would be a great injustice. I will simply repeat what I have already said above: he set out upon this path only because at the time it alone struck him and presented him all at once with the whole ideal way out for his soul struggling from darkness to light. Add to this that he was partly a young man of our time—that is, honest by nature, demanding the truth, seeking it and believing in it, and in that belief demanding immediate participation in it with all the strength of his soul; demanding an immediate deed, with an unfailing desire to sacrifice everything for this deed, even life. Although, unfortunately, these young men do not understand that the sacrifice of life is, perhaps, the easiest of all sacrifices in many cases, while to sacrifice, for example, five or six years of their ebulliently youthful life to hard, difficult studies, to learning, in order to increase tenfold their strength to serve the very truth and the very deed that they loved and set out to accomplish—such sacrifice is quite often almost beyond the strength of many of them. Alyosha simply chose the opposite path from all others, but with the same thirst for an immediate deed. As soon as he reflected seriously and was struck by the conviction that immortality and God exist, he naturally said at once to himself: “I want to live for immortality, and I reject any halfway compromise.” In just the same way, if he had decided that immortality and God do not exist, he would immediately have joined the atheists and socialists (for socialism is not only the labor question or the question of the so-called fourth estate, but first of all the question of atheism, the question of the modern embodiment of atheism, the question of the Tower of Babel built precisely without God, not to go from earth to heaven but to bring heaven down to earth).^[13]To Alyosha it even seemed strange and impossible to go on living as before. It was said: “If thou wilt be perfect, give all that thou hast to the poor and come and follow me.”^[14] So Alyosha said to himself: “I cannot give two roubles instead of ‘all,’ and instead of ‘follow me’ just go to the Sunday liturgy.” Among his early childhood memories, something may have been preserved about our neighboring monastery, where his mother may have taken him to the Sunday liturgy. Perhaps he was also affected by the slanting rays of the setting sun before the icon to which his mother, the “shrieker,” held him out. Thoughtful, he came to us, then, maybe only to see if it was “all” here, or if here, too, there were only “two roubles”—and in the monastery he met this elder . . .