The Brothers Karamazov

This section covers the following chapters: “In the Servants’ Quarters,” “Stinking Lizaveta,” “The Confession of an Ardent Heart. In Verse,” “The Confession of an Ardent Heart. In Anecdotes,” “The Confession of an Ardent Heart. ‘Heels Up,’” “Smerdyakov,” “Disputation,” “Over the Cognac,” “The Sensualists,” “The Two Together,” and “One More Ruined Reputation.”

Grigory Vasilievich, his wife, Marfa Ignatievna, and Smerdyakov are Fyodor’s three servants who live in a cottage together. Twenty-four years ago, Grigory and Marfa lost a child to thrush; on the same day that they buried their child, Grigory heard crying from outside and found a local homeless woman, “a holy fool […] known as Stinking Lizaveta” (96) giving birth in the outhouse. She died in the morning, and Grigory and Marfa took Lizaveta’s child as their own. Though he did not confess that the child was his flesh and blood, Fyodor named the boy Smerdyakov, meaning “son of the stinking one.”

Alyosha runs into a rapturous and drunken Dmitri, who breaks into song and confesses that he has fallen in love (though, even in his drunkenness, he remarks that to fall in love is not the same thing as to actually love). Dmitri tells Alyosha that while in the military, Dmitri met Katerina Ivanovna (also called “Katya”).