The Feast of the Damned

Dmitri Karamazov arrives at the Mokroye inn at two in the morning with blood on his coat, loaded pistols under the seat, a note in his pocket that reads "I punish myself for my whole life, my whole life I punish!" — and immediately orders three dozen bottles of champagne, fondants, Strasburg pies, and chocolate for all the girls.

He is planning to shoot himself at dawn.

This is not contradiction. This is Mitya.

The scene at Mokroye is one of the strangest in world literature. A man who has just watched himself nearly commit patricide, who believes he has crippled an old servant (Grigory's blood is still drying on his hands), who has learned in the same hour that the woman he loves has gone to meet her first lover — this man walks into a provincial inn and throws a party that wakes the whole village.

By the time the police arrive, there are dancing girls, a Jewish band with fiddles and zithers, a comical drunk named Maximov dancing to a song about a little pig, the Polish swindlers exposed at cards, Grushenka weeping with joy in Mitya's arms because the officer she waited five years for turned out to be a fat fraud in a wig. The room is full of champagne and candles and genuine human noise.

Dostoevsky does not present this as irony. He presents it as real.

The conventional reading of such a scene would be: the condemned man makes merry to forget. The party is denial, escapism, the party is Mitya running from what he's done.

But watch what happens inside the feast. Mitya is not numbing himself. He is paying attention with more intensity than he has all day. He notices Grushenka's mood — that she is sending him away but keeping him close, that she is not yet ready to say what she needs to say. He notices Kalganov, the young dandy, and feels genuine tenderness: "What a dear, charming boy he is!" He worries about Andrey the driver and sends him vodka. He apologizes to Fenya for frightening her.

He is not absent. He is more present than he's been all night. The feast strips away the frantic money-seeking, the jealous surveillance, the grandiose plans — and leaves Mitya doing what he actually does well: existing in a room with people, being generous, being delighted.

And in the middle of it: Grushenka takes his hand and asks him who she loves.

"A falcon flew in, and my heart sank. 'Fool! that's the man you love!' That was what my heart whispered to me at once."

She has been waiting five years for a man who doesn't exist anymore — a young officer who wronged her in Siberia, who came back aged and dyed and grasping, who called her a "perverse and shameless" woman when she threw him out. The whole romantic tragedy of her five years dissolves in an evening. And she turns to Mitya, who arrived to die, and chooses him.

"I will be your slave, I'll work for you."

This is the feast: catastrophe producing revelation, collapse producing love.

There is a theological structure underneath the comedy.

Earlier in the novel — in a different register entirely — Alyosha dreams of Zosima at the wedding feast at Cana. "It was not men's grief but their joy Christ visited," the dream-Zosima tells him. "He worked His first miracle to help men's gladness." Alyosha wakes from this dream and throws himself on the earth in rapture.

Dostoevsky is building a parallel. The miracle at Cana was not solemn. It was a party. The first miracle was transforming water into wine because the wedding feast had run dry. Christ shows up at celebrations, not only at funerals.

The Mokroye feast is a catastrophe by every ordinary measure. A murder has been committed, an arrest is imminent, a man is planning to die. And in this catastrophe: people are genuinely together. Grushenka finds her way through a false myth to a true love. Mitya, for the first time all night, stops running.

The police interrupt this. They arrive, as they must. "I un—der—stand!" Mitya cries, and collapses.

But the feast happened. It cannot be un-happened.

What does it mean that Mitya can throw this feast?

It means he is not nihilistic. This is the crucial thing about him. He plans suicide but he cannot make the world small enough to justify not celebrating. He loves life with what the narrator calls "a love that was almost shameful in its intensity." He will die for it, but he will not stop loving it.

The night has exposed everything — the jealousy, the violence, the guilt, the money-chaos, the disaster of his family. And at the center of all this exposure: a man who ordered chocolate for the village girls because "they're so fond of it."

There's a line that almost goes unnoticed. When the feast is fully underway and Grushenka is drunk and the music is playing, she suddenly says: "I gave a little onion. Wicked as I've been, I want to pray."

The onion again. The one good deed from Book VII — the parable of the woman who kicked others away from her single onion, the parable of how even the most selfish person has one act that might lift them out. Grushenka remembers it here, in the middle of delirium, in the middle of feasting, and reaches for it.

The feast and the prayer are the same gesture. Both are ways of refusing to be only one thing — only guilty, only doomed, only condemned.

Mitya arrives planning to die. He leaves in handcuffs, which is a different kind of dying. But between those two states: one hour in which everyone in a country inn was genuinely alive together, and a woman said to a man she loves him, and he said he would love her in Siberia if it came to that.

Which it will.

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