The Brothers Karamazov

“I may have my own reasons for visiting her; let that be enough for you. As for our relations, your good brother or even your own papa himself is more likely to foist her on you than on me. Well, here we are. Better march off to the kitchen. Hah, what’s this, what’s happening? Are we late? They couldn’t have finished dinner so soon! Or is it some more Karamazov mischief? That must be it. There goes your father, with Ivan Fyodorovich after him. They’ve bolted from the Father Superior’s. Look, Father Isidore is shouting something at them from the porch. And your father is shouting, too, and waving his arms—he must be swearing. Hah, and Miusov, too, has left in his carriage, there he goes. And the landowner Maximov is running—we’ve had a scandal! It means there wasn’t any dinner! Maybe they thrashed the Superior? Or got thrashed themselves? That would be a good one . . .!”

Rakitin’s exclamations were not without point. There had indeed been a scandal, unheard-of and unexpected. It all happened “by inspiration.”

Chapter 8: Scandal

Miusov and Ivan Fyodorovich were already entering the Superior’s rooms when a sort of delicate process quickly transpired in Pyotr Alexandrovich, a genuinely decent and delicate man: he felt ashamed of his anger. He felt within himself that, essentially, his contempt for the worthless Fyodor Pavlovich should have been such as to have kept him from losing his composure in the elder’s cell and getting as lost as he had done himself. “It was not at all the monks’ fault, in any case,” he suddenly decided on the Superior’s porch, “and if there are decent people here as well (this Father Nikolai, the Superior, seems to be of the gentry, too), then why not be nice, amiable, and courteous with them ... ? I shan’t argue, I shall even yes them in everything, I shall seduce them with amiability, and ... and ... finally prove to them that I am not of the same society as that Aesop, that buffoon, that Pierrot, and was taken in just as they all were...”

The controversial wood-cutting in the forest and the fishing (where it all went on he himself did not know) he determined to relinquish to them finally, once and for all, that very day, and to stop his court actions against the monastery, the more so since it was all worth very little anyway.

All these good intentions were further strengthened when they entered the Father Superior’s dining room. There was no dining room, incidentally, because the entire apartment in fact consisted of two rooms, though indeed far more spacious and comfortable than the elder’s. But the furnishings of the rooms were not more distinguished by any special comfort: leather-covered mahogany, in the old fashion of the twenties; the floors were not even painted; yet everything was bright and clean, there were many costly plants in the windows; but the main luxury at the moment was, naturally, the luxuriously laid table—once again, relatively speaking, by the way: a clean table cloth, sparkling dishes, perfectly baked bread of three kinds, two bottles of wine, two bottles of excellent monastery mead, and a big glass jug of monastery kvass, famous throughout the neighborhood. There was no vodka at all. Rakitin recounted afterwards that the dinner this time consisted of five courses: a sturgeon soup with little fish pies; then boiled fish prepared in some particular and perfect way; then salmon cakes, ice cream and fruit compote, and finally a little custard resembling blancmange. Rakitin sniffed it all out, unable to restrain himself, peeking for that purpose into the Superior’s kitchen, where he also had his connections. He had connections everywhere and made spies everywhere. He had a restless and covetous heart. He was fully aware of his considerable abilities, but in his conceit he nervously exaggerated them. He knew for certain that he would become a figure of some sort, but Alyosha, who was very attached to him, was tormented that his friend Rakitin was dishonest and was decidedly unaware of it; that, on the contrary, knowing he wouldn’t steal money from the table, he ultimately considered himself a man of the highest integrity. Here neither Alyosha nor anyone else could do anything.