The Brothers Karamazov: Part 1: Book 2, Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

There are about twenty women near the wooden porch “built onto the outside wall.” The widowed Madame Khokhlakov and her paralyzed fourteen-year-old daughter, Lise, are also on the porch. Zosima the elder appears on the porch and stands on the top step. The crowd presses toward the steps that connect “the low porch with the field.” A “shrieker” is “pulled up to him by both hands.” She begins to shriek, hiccup, and shake all over “as if in convulsions.” Zosima covers her head with his stole and reads her a prayer, which calms her.

Many of the women who move toward Zosima are crying “tears of tenderness and rapture.” Others try to kiss the hem of his clothes. The elder points to a woman named Nastasia who comes from two hundred miles away. She’s in mourning for her three-year-old son, the last of her children to die. Her husband, Nikitushka, has taken to drinking, and she has abandoned him and her home. Zosima encourages her to think that her child “stands before the throne of the Lord, rejoicing and being glad, and praying to God” on her behalf. He tells her to weep and then to rejoice. The woman, however, can’t stop thinking about how she’ll never see or hear her son, whose name was Alexei, ever again.

Zosima tells Nastasia that he’ll remember her in his prayers. He then tells her to go back to her husband, because it is a sin for her to abandon him. She agrees to return home and tells the elder that he’s “touched [her] heart.” Zosima then shifts his attention to “a very little old lady” who is “the widow of a noncommissioned officer.” This is Madame Prokhorovna. She worries that her son, Vasenka, is dead because he has stopped writing to her. Zosima assures her that the boy is alive and that she should go and “be at peace.”

Zosima then focuses on a “still young, peasant woman” who looks “consumptive.” She’s a widow whose husband used to beat her. She nearly confesses to having killed her husband while he was on his sickbed. Zosima tells her not to let repentance “slacken” in her. She will then be forgiven. He blesses her three times, takes an icon from around his neck, and puts it around hers. After taking a donation of sixty kopecks from a woman who wants to provide for “some woman who’s poorer” than she is, Zosima blesses all of the women and bows “deeply” to them.