The Brothers Karamazov

“What do you mean? How can you be? And why?” exclaimed the surprised Alyosha.

“Oh, if only I, too, could some day offer myself as a sacrifice for truth!” Kolya said with enthusiasm.

“But not for such a cause, not with such disgrace, not with such horror!” said Alyosha. “Of course ... I should like to die for all mankind, and as for disgrace, it makes no difference: let our names perish. I respect your brother!”

“And so do I!” another boy suddenly and quite unexpectedly called out from the crowd, the same boy who had once announced that he knew who had founded Troy, and, just as he had done then, having called it out, he blushed up to his ears like a peony.

Alyosha went into the room. In a blue coffin decorated with white lace, his hands folded and his eyes closed, lay Ilyusha. The features of his emaciated face were hardly changed at all, and, strangely, there was almost no smell from the corpse. The expression of his face was serious and, as it were, pensive. His hands, folded crosswise, were especially beautiful, as if carved from marble. Flowers had been placed in his hands, and the whole coffin was adorned inside and out with flowers, sent at daybreak from Liza Khokhlakov. But flowers had also come from Katerina Ivanovna, and, as Alyosha opened the door, the captain, with a bunch of flowers in his trembling hands, was again strewing them over his dear boy. He barely glanced at Alyosha when he came in, nor did he want to look at anyone, not even at his mad, weeping wife, his “mama,” who kept trying to stand up on her bad legs and have a closer look at her dead boy. But Ninochka had been picked up in her chair by the children and moved close to the coffin. She was sitting with her head pressed to it, and must also have been quietly weeping. Snegiryov’s face looked animated but, as it were, bewildered, and at the same time embittered. There was something half crazed in his gestures, in the words that kept bursting from him. “Dear fellow, dear old fellow!” he exclaimed every moment, looking at Ilyusha. He had had the habit, when Ilyusha was still alive, of calling him tenderly: “Dear fellow, dear old fellow!”

“Papa, give me flowers, too, take one from his hands, that white one, and give it to me!” the mad “mama” asked, sobbing. Either she liked the little white rose in Ilyusha’s hand very much, or else she wanted to take a flower from his hands as a keepsake, for she began tossing about, reaching out for the flower.

“I’m not giving anything, not to anybody!” Snegiryov exclaimed hard-heartedly. “They’re his flowers, not yours. It’s all his, nothing’s yours!”

“Papa, give mother the flower!” Ninochka suddenly raised her face, wet with tears.

“I won’t give anything, to her least of all! She didn’t love him. She took his little cannon away from him that time, and he ... gave it to her,” the captain suddenly sobbed loudly, remembering how Ilyusha had let his mother have the little cannon. The poor, mad woman simply dissolved in quiet tears, covering her face with her hands. Finally, seeing that the father would not let the coffin go from him, but that it was time to carry it out, the boys suddenly crowded around the coffin and began to lift it up.

“I don’t want him buried in the churchyard!” Snegiryov suddenly cried out. “I’ll bury him by the stone, by our stone! Ilyusha told me to! I won’t let you take him!”

Previously, too, over the past three days, he had been saying that he would bury him by the stone; but Alyosha, Krasotkin, the landlady, her sister, all the boys intervened.

“What an idea, to bury him by some heathenish stone, like some hanged man,” the old landlady said sternly. “The ground in the churchyard has the cross on it. They’ll pray for him there. You can hear singing from the church there, and the deacon is so clean-spoken and literal when he reads, it will all reach him every time, as if they were reading right over his grave.”

The captain finally waved his hands as if to say: “Take him wherever you like!” The children picked up the coffin, but as they carried it past his mother, they stopped in front of her for a moment and set it down, so that she could say her farewells to Ilyusha. But, suddenly looking so closely at that dear little face, which for the past three days she had only seen from a distance, she began suddenly shaking all over, wagging her gray head back and forth hysterically above the coffin.

“Mama, cross him, bless him, kiss him,” Ninochka cried to her. But she kept wagging her head like an automaton, and then, silently, her face twisted with burning grief, she suddenly began beating her breast with her fist. They moved on with the coffin. Ninochka pressed her lips to her dead brother’s mouth for the last time as they carried it past her. Alyosha turned to the landlady as he was leaving the house and tried to ask her to look after those who were staying behind, but she would not even let him finish: