The Brothers Karamazov

The desire for a miracle is a motif throughout the novel, symbolizing both the weakness of human faith in the face of suffering and the human tendency to want immediate proof of invisible realities; because the characters believe Zosima was holy, they expect this holiness to translate to a gratifying spectacle. This naïveté again contrasts with Zosima’s notion of active love, which is quiet and unglamorous. The episode achieves even greater thematic resonance in light of the biblical story of Job, which Zosima emphasized in his teaching: Job was righteous, yet his life spiraled into catastrophe—and because Job’s society assumed that prosperity (or God’s material favor) was necessary proof for a person’s righteousness, Job was outcast and assumed to be sinful. One of the lessons of Job is that material reality neither manifests nor rewards the state of a person’s soul; likewise, Zosima’s righteousness does not express itself through an incorruptible corpse.

Ferapont, who fully subscribes to superstitiousness and sensationalism, is like the society who ostracized Job; he sees the corpse’s purification as evidence of Zosima’s corrupt soul. His zealotry leads him to extreme asceticism and a rejection of Father Zosima. His outburst at the funeral is the height of his delusional outrage and shows that his faith is weak and misguided, based on material manifestations of spirituality. However, a miracle does occur on this day, though it is unseen by the public: The moment of siblinghood established between Grushenka and Alyosha.

Alyosha demonstrates the strength of his own faith through his encounter with Grushenka and how he handles Rakitin’s temptations. Grushenka and Alyosha have an exchange, not of lust (as Rakitin was hoping) but of pure love: This familial love is symbolized by the onion that Grushenka mentions in the folklore fable she recounts. Grushenka compares herself to the woman from a fable she heard in her childhood. The woman’s only good deed in her whole life was when she gave an onion to a beggar. Burning in the lake of hell, the woman’s guardian angel appeared and held out an onion for her to grab onto that would save her from hell. When she grabbed onto the onion, the other people burning in the lake around her grabbed onto her, trying to be lifted out by the onion as well. The woman kicked them all away from herself, saying “it’s my onion, not yours” (353), and the onion broke and she fell back into hell. Grushenka then confesses to Alyosha, and Alyosha and Grushenka help each other to survive their moments of weakness and doubt. This incites a character transformation in Grushenka, who turns away from selfishness and toward magnanimity. The onion symbol repeats in Alyosha’s vision of Zosima, who tells him that God is waiting for new guests at his banquet. Alyosha returns to the monastery to sleep and has a mystical experience in which he sees a vision of Father Zosima, who then says: “I gave a little onion, and so I am here” (361).

Father Paissy’s readings refer to Jesus’s first miracle of turning water into wine at a wedding banquet in Galilee. This biblical miracle of transformation, at least in the novel, symbolizes love’s power to transform suffering into faith; this again corresponds with Job, and it mirrors how Alyosha’s despair is transfigured into a sacred moment that binds him and Grushenka as brother and sister. Through love and forgiveness, Alyosha overcomes the temptations that Rakitin puts before him. This is perhaps Alyosha’s first miracle.

Rakitin’s character is a “devil” or Satanic figure, as he offers temptations to Alyosha and other characters at their moments of greatest weakness. This alludes back to the story of the three temptations of Christ. The irony that Rakitin is a seminarian is purposeful, as the novel often shows that religious figures can be just as corrupt as anyone else (a truth that Zosima also asserted in his last days). Moreover, though Rakitin is a learned intellectual, the events at Grushenka’s reveal that he lacks wisdom. He believes that because Alyosha is sorrowful and disillusioned by the world that he is more vulnerable to temptation; instead, Alyosha’s grief acts as “the strongest armor” (349) against these temptations. When Grushenka hears that Father Zosima has just died, she has a moment of self-awareness and realizes with horror that she is tempting a grieving man. Rakitin’s plan fails because his self-absorbed, egotistical nature precludes genuine insight into others’ souls. This shows the devilish Rakitin’s true nature: He is petty and incapable of seeing motivations beyond lust, greed, or other base desires. This foreshadows Ivan’s hallucinations of the devil, in which the demon is obnoxious and small-minded.