Day 70

Epilogue / Chapter 3

“It’s all so strange, Karamazov, such grief, and then pancakes all of a sudden—!”

And here we are too, arriving at the end, with Kolya as he pivots on an instant from expressions of great compassion to the familiar irritable arrogance and back again.

“Let us first of all and before all be kind, then honest, and then—let us never forget one another,” Alyosha says to the boys at the stone.

“You are all dear to me, gentlemen, from now on I shall keep you all in my heart, and I ask you to keep me in your hearts, too! Well, who has united us in this good, kind feeling, which we will remember and intend to remember always, all our lives, who, if not Ilyushechka, that good boy, that kind boy, that boy dear to us unto ages of ages! Let us never forget him and may his memory be eternal and good in our hearts now and unto ages of ages!”

And in his celebration of life—“Ah, children, ah, dear friends, do not be afraid of life! How good life is when you do something good and rightful!”—Alyosha comes back to Kolya’s pancakes: “Don’t be disturbed that we’ll be eating pancakes. It’s an ancient eternal thing, and there’s good in that, too.”

---

This final chapter, beyond its pathos, is a set-up for things to come that never come, and with its celebration of life even in death it is an evocation of Easter: from Kolya’s “I feel very sad, and if only it were possible to resurrect him, I’d give everything in the world!” to the number of boys gathered around Alyosha—twelve—for his spontaneous sermon at the stone—the stone in the road where Snegiryov wanted to bury Ilyushechka (whose body, by the way, gives off “almost no smell”).

“What an idea, to bury him by some heathenish stone, like some hanged man,” the old landlady said sternly.

The number of days between Ilyusha’s death and the present moment parallels the distance from Good Friday’s crucifixion to Easter Sunday’s resurrection: the action of the epilogue takes place five days after Mitya’s trial: his sentencing came the day after the trial; Mitya fell into a fever the next day (two days after the court’s decision); Ilyusha died the day after that (two days after the sentencing and two days ago).

As the chapter delivers the Hosannahs of one of Ivan’s poems, it also suggests the direction of the unwritten book to come. “Oh, if only I, too, could some day offer myself as a sacrifice for truth!” Kolya cries. “I should like to die for all mankind, and as for disgrace, it makes no difference: let our names perish.”

---

Thank you all for reading together—please keep commenting and watch for a follow-up coming soon. Alyosha gets today’s last words:

“Let us never forget how good we once felt here, all together, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, for the time that we loved the poor boy, perhaps better than we actually are.”

---