The Brothers Karamazov

This section covers the following chapters: “At Grushenka’s,” “An Ailing Little Foot,” “A Little Demon,” “A Hymn and a Secret,” “Not You! Not You!,” “The First Meeting with Smerdyakov,” “The Second Visit to Smerdyakov,” “The Third and Last Meeting with Smerdyakov,” “The Devil. Ivan Fyodorovich’s Nightmare,” and “‘He Said That!’.”

Grushenka tells Alyosha that Ivan has been visiting Dmitri, and she’s worried they’re up to something and keeping secrets from her. She asks Alyosha to investigate, and he agrees to visit Dmitri.

Before he visits his brother, however, Alyosha stops to visit Lise. He finds her in a feverish, erratic state, almost seeming possessed. She says she’s broken off the engagement with Alyosha because she no longer respects him—in fact, she no longer respects anything. She confesses that she’s been having destructive urges and praying to God to punish her. She makes an enigmatic remark about talking to a “man” about her troubles, but this man laughed at her. Alyosha realizes she’s talking about Ivan. She tells Alyosha to leave but first gives him a note for Ivan. After Alyosha leaves, she slams the door on her own finger.

Alyosha visits Dmitri in jail and is surprised that Dmitri is talking about God rather than his upcoming trial. Dmitri has accepted that he will suffer in prison but that he will “sing a tragic hymn to God, in whom there is joy!” (592). He divulges that Ivan has been urging him to escape to America with Grushenka; this is the secret that Dmitri and Ivan have been keeping from Grushenka. Dmitri says that Ivan believes Dmitri is guilty, but Alyosha believes in Dmitri’s innocence.

Alyosha visits Katerina, and Ivan is on his way out. Ivan looks sick, and Katerina is anxious. After Ivan leaves, Katerina confides to Alyosha that she thinks Ivan is becoming psychologically unstable and that he has a “nervous fever.” She begs Alyosha to follow him. Alyosha hurries to catch up with Ivan, and he hands Lise’s note to Ivan; Ivan tears it up and tosses it into the wind, remarking that the letter was probably sexual in nature. Alyosha is dismayed that Ivan would make this uncharitable assumption about a child. Ivan, who seems agitated, tells Alyosha that Katerina has proof that Dmitri is guilty. When Alyosha says that this is impossible, Ivan asks Alyosha who, if not Dmitri, killed their father, and Alyosha realizes that Ivan considers himself somehow indirectly responsible for the death. Wanting to assure Ivan that he’s not responsible, Alyosha trembles as he says: “[I]t was not you who killed father, not you!” (601).

Ivan, with a “crooked grin,” says that he knows he himself isn’t the murder. However, he suddenly seems disoriented and starts saying nonsensical things about an unidentified man who’s been bothering him. Alyosha is confused, but Ivan suddenly regains composure. Alyosha tries to bring up the topic of God, but this upsets Ivan, who leaves.

Ivan heads out to talk with Smerdyakov, who has been sick since Fyodor’s murder. The narrator explains that this is the third meeting Ivan has had with Smerdyakov; the first meeting was immediately after Fyodor’s murder, and the second meeting was two weeks after that.

The narrator explains about the first two visits. During Ivan’s first visit, Smerdyakov alleged that Ivan had secretly wanted Fyodor dead. Smerdyakov said that, on the day of the murder, Ivan had left the Karamazov house because he’d known this would leave Fyodor vulnerable to the murderous Dmitri. Ivan tried to protest. At Ivan’s second meeting with Smerdyakov, Smerdyakov again said that Ivan’s departure from the Karamazov house is what allowed the murder; Smerdyakov argued that this amounts to complicity and, again, that Ivan secretly wanted his father dead. Ivan then truly started to fear that he himself was somehow responsible. He visited Katerina, and Katerina showed him a drunkenly-scrawled letter that Dmitri wrote vowing to smash his father’s head and take his money to repay Katerina. After Ivan saw this letter, he felt reassured that Dmitri, and not himself, was responsible for the murder.

Now on Ivan’s third visit with Smerdyakov, Smerdyakov tells Ivan to stop pretending that he doesn’t know who is guilty: He says Ivan is “the main killer, and I was just your minion, your faithful servant” (623). Smerdyakov says that he himself did the deed, but he explains that all his conversations with Ivan—all the philosophizing about morality—convinced him that the murder permissible, and Smerdyakov had believed that Ivan wanted Fyodor dead anyway. Therefore, says Smerdyakov, Ivan is no less culpable. Smerdyakov has 3,000 roubles that he says is from the envelope Fyodor set aside for Grushenka. Ivan says that tomorrow he will confess to his part in the murder, but Smerdyakov says that Ivan would never confess due to his nature: Ivan loves status, wealth, and prosperity too much because he is “like Fyodor Pavlovich most of all […] having the same soul as him” (632).

When Ivan returns home, he is suffering from “brain fever” (634) and hallucinates a man, and the man insists that he is real. His rambling anecdotes annoy Ivan. The man says his primary goal is for Ivan to live in constant vacillation “between belief and disbelief” (645). As the hallucination continues to taunt him, Ivan feels he is losing touch with reality. Just then, Alyosha knocks on Ivan’s door.

Alyosha tells Ivan that Smerdyakov has hanged himself. Ivan, now frantic and incoherent, tells Alyosha that the devil visits him, so Alyosha spends the night taking care of his feverish brother. Alyosha is relieved that Smerdyakov is dead; the suicide suggests that Smerdyakov is the real murderer—and now, even if Ivan mistakenly confesses to the murder, no one will believe him.