The Brothers Karamazov

“That I’m sorry for God? Chemistry, brother, chemistry! Move over a little, Your Reverence, there’s no help for it, chemistry’s coming! And Rakitin doesn’t like God, oof, how he doesn’t! That’s the sore spot in all of them! But they conceal it. They lie. They pretend. ‘What, are you going to push for that in the department of criticism?’ I asked. ‘Well, they won’t let me do it openly,’ he said, and laughed. ‘But,’ I asked, ‘how will man be after that? Without God and the future life? It means everything is permitted now, one can do anything?’ ‘Didn’t you know?’ he said. And he laughed. ‘Everything is permitted to the intelligent man,’ he said. ‘The intelligent man knows how to catch crayfish, but you killed and fouled it up,’ he said, ‘and now you’re rotting in prison!’ He said that to me. A natural-born swine! I once used to throw the likes of him out—well, and now I listen to them. He does talk a lot of sense, after all. He writes intelligently, too. About a week ago he started reading me an article, I wrote down three lines of it on purpose; wait, here it is.”

Mitya hurriedly pulled a piece of paper from his waistcoat pocket and read:

“‘In order to resolve this question it is necessary, first of all, to put one’s person in conflict with one’s actuality.’ Do you understand that?”

“No, I don’t,” said Alyosha.

He was watching Mitya and listened to him with curiosity.

“I don’t understand it either. Obscure and vague, but intelligent. ‘Everybody writes like that now,’he says,’because it’s that sort of environment . . .’ They’re afraid of the environment. He also writes verses, the scoundrel, he celebrated Khokhlakov’s little foot, ha, ha, ha!”

“So I’ve heard,” said Alyosha.

“You have? And have you heard the jingle itself?”

“No.” “I have it; here, I’ll read it to you. You don’t know, I never told you, but there’s a whole story here. The swindler! Three weeks ago he decided to tease me: ‘You fouled it up, like a fool,’ he said, ‘for the sake of three thousand, but I’ll grab a hundred and fifty thousand, marry a certain widow, and buy a stone house in Petersburg.’ And he told me he was offering his attentions to Khokhlakov, and that she, who wasn’t very smart to begin with, had lost her mind altogether by the age of forty. ‘But she’s very sentimental,’ he said, ‘so that’s how I’ll bring it off with her. I’ll marry her, take her to Petersburg, and start a newspaper there. ‘ And he had such nasty, sensual drool on his lips—drooling not over Khokhlakov, but over the hundred and fifty thousand. And he convinced me, he convinced me; he kept coming to see me every day; she’s weakening, he said. He was beaming with joy. And then suddenly he was turned out: Perkhotin, Pyotr Ilyich, got the upper hand, good fellow! I mean, I really could kiss the foolish woman for turning him out! So it was while he was coming to see me that he also wrote this jingle. ‘For the first time in my life,’ he said, ‘I’ve dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction—that is, for the sake of a useful cause. If I get the capital away from the foolish woman, then I can be of civic use.’ Because they have a civic excuse for every abomination! ‘And anyway,’ he said, ‘I’ve done a better job of writing than your Pushkin, because I managed to stick civic woes even into a foolish jingle.’ What he says about Pushkin I quite understand. After all, maybe he really was a capable man, but all he wrote about was little feet! And how proud he was of his little jingles! Such vanity they have, such vanity! ‘For the Recovery of My Object’s Ailing Little Foot’—that’s the title he came up with—a nimble fellow!

Ah, what a charming little foot,

But what a swelling has come to ‘t!

Tho’ doctors visit, bringing balm,

They only seem to do it harm.^[296]

I do not long for little feet—Let Pushkin sing them if he please: My longing’s for a head that’s sweet But does not comprehend ideas.

It used to comprehend a bit;

The little foot’s distracted it! Oh, little foot, if you’d but mend, The little head might comprehend.’

“A swine, a pure swine, but he’s written it playfully, the scoundrel! And he really did stick in his ‘civic’ idea. And how mad he was when he got turned out. He was gnashing!” “He’s already had his revenge,” said Alyosha. “He wrote an article about Madame Khokhlakov.”

And Alyosha told him hastily about the article in the newspaper Rumors.

“That’s him, him!” Mitya confirmed, frowning. “It’s him! These articles ... how well I know ... I mean, so many base things have already been written, about Grusha, for instance . . .! And about the other one, about Katya .. . Hm!”

He walked worriedly around the room.

“Brother, I can’t stay with you long,” Alyosha said, after a pause. “Tomorrow will be a terrible, great day for you: divine judgment will be passed on you ... and so it surprises me that you’re walking around, talking about God knows what instead of anything that matters ...”